The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today—since Dr. Trapesnikoff has ordered them—we will show you some pictures arranged from a different point of view than in our former lectures; more from the point of view of subject-matter. The pictures today will relate especially to the birth of Christ Jesus, the Adoration by the Shepherds and by the Three Wise Men, and finally the Flight into Egypt. Comprising an evolution through several centuries, they will bring before our souls, from another aspect, that which is living in the Old Christmas Plays of which we have been speaking in the last lectures. We shall thus be concerned today, not in the first place with the artistic elements, as such, but with the treatment of a certain theme in the history of Art, and I will therefore speak not so much of the evolution of artistic principles, but draw your attention to some other points of view which may be of interest in relation to these pictures. You will, however, bear in mind the general lines of development of Christian Art, which we have described in the past lectures of this series. You will observe the same great trend of evolution, as we pass from the artistic representations of the early Christian centuries into the times of the Renaissance. First you will see the more typical representations of an early time. These, as we have seen, were still under the influence of Revelations from the Spiritual World. Less concerned with naturalistic expressions of form and color, they try to reproduce the spiritual Imaginations, revealed out of the Spiritual World. Thenceforward you will see this Christian Art evolve towards Naturalism, that is, towards a certain reproduction of that which may be called reality from the point of view of the physical plane. As we follow the evolution of this Art, the sacred personalities stand before us in a more and more human form.

We shall first show some pictures relating more especially to the Birth of Christ. Then we shall show the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds; indeed, these two, to some extent, will go together. The next series of pictures will deal mainly with the story of the Three Wise Men of the East—the Magi. Here I beg you to observe how the two streams evolve: the stream of St. Luke's Gospel, as we may call it, and that of the Gospel of St. Matthew. They are the streams which take their start from the two Jesus Children. Artistically, too, we can recognise the difference. The Adoration by the Shepherds—all that is more or less related to this theme—could best be understood (understood, that is to say, by the inner feelings) under the influence of what remained from those Northern Mysteries whose center, as I told you, was in Denmark. This stream is connected with all that related to the Birth of Jesus—springing forth, as it were, with Jesus, out of the earthly evolution, out of the spiritual beings that are bound up with the life of Nature.

In the Adoration by the Magi, on the other hand—the mission of the Three Wise Men from the East—we always find a direct expression of the “Gnostic” stream. Under the influence of the “Star”—which means, something that is made known out of the Cosmos—the Wise Men draw near to the Christ Who heralds His approach and develops in the Zarathustra Jesus. In all that is connected with the Adoration by the Three Wise Men, we have, therefore the Gnostic stream: the consciousness that the Christ-Event was a cosmic one; that a fertilisation of the Earth had taken place out of the Cosmos.

Our friends have been kind enough to put up here a drawing of the Three Wise Men. The picture is taken from an old Gospel Book. We see them looking up in adoration, that is, in quest of spiritual knowledge, by striving upward with all their inner being, and looking up to the Star wherein the Spirit Who shall liberate the Earth draws near.

1. Three Wise Men.

It may truly be said that this stream, which finds expression in St. Matthew's Gospel, was less and less understood in the further course of centuries. True, it also came to life, as you know, in the Old Christmas Plays. But the appearance of the Three Wise Men of the East cannot really be understood with the same understanding, as the appearance of Jesus to the Shepherds according to St. Luke's Gospel. For the latter is a simple understanding of the heart, of inner feeling; while the understanding which we must bring to bear on all that is connected with the Wise Men from the East must needs be of a “Gnostic” character. All that is signified by the Wise Men “following the Star” will only come into the consciousness of humanity again when—not the Gnosis this time, it is true—but anthroposophical Spiritual Science gains acceptance.

Finally, we shall show some pictures of the Flight into Egypt. This, too, is connected with the “Gnostic” Revelation concerning Jesus Christ. We cannot speak of it at great length today; we may return to it another time.

To begin with, it is important here, again, to realise that there is a certain underlying composition in all that the Gospels contain. The composition is always important. We need only faithfully follow the Gospel narrative. The Flight into Egypt appears in direct connection with the Mission of the Three Wise Men. It happens, as it were, on the basis of what was first undertaken by the Three Wise Men. This bears witness to the fact that the Gospel is taking into account the connection with all that was related about Egypt in the Old Testament. Moses was learned in the Wisdom of the Egyptians. Now we are told in the Gospel that the Three Wise Men of the East came to the birthplace of Christ Jesus, led by the Star which is really the Star of Christ. But it goes on to relate that something now had to take place which did not entirely accord, as it were, with the course of the Star; something which was not in the consciousness of the Wise Men themselves—for so the Gospel explicitly tells us. Here we are shown one of those cases where the astrological determination, as it were, of certain great events has to be broken through. How precisely the astrological determination corresponds to what is known of the historic facts—you could see this from the instance which we spoke of recently. Our friends drew up the Horoscope for that point in the course of Time which was indicated as the day of Christ Jesus's Death.

But we see that the Jesus Child, in whom the Zarathustra Soul was living, had to be taken out of the domain of this Star. He was taken into Egypt, and from Egypt He was then led back again into the realm of the Star. In this is contained the whole Mystery of the ebbing away of that ancient stream of evolution which had grown atavistic in the Egyptian Gnosis. The new Revelation had to enter once more into a certain union with the Old in order that it might free itself consciously.

These are the underlying Mysteries, and though they are little recognised, none the less they lie inherent in the composition. I may take this opportunity to point out once more, how important it is to pay attention to the composition when we read the Gospels. For the text is frequently corrupt and can only be read in its true form by those who are able to read with the help, if I may say so, of the Occult Text. Notably in the translations, naturally enough, the text is often quite unintelligible. But in the composition (compare my Lecture Cycle held in Cassel on the Gospel of St. John)—in the composition there is something which will strike any reader immediately, if he reads the Gospel carefully.

One more remark I would like to make, before we go on to show the pictures. The materialistic consciousness of our age has altogether lost the point of view which would indicate such inner connections as underlie the revelation to the Three Wise Men. Whatever goes by the name of Astrology today has fallen into the hands of utter dilettanti, who carry on all kinds of nonsense and abuses with it. Few people nowadays are in true earnest when they speak of that relation of the Earth to the Cosmos which finds expression in actual physical relationships—in the constellations of the Stars. On the other hand, for the official Science of today Astrology of whatever kind is a mere antiquated superstition.

Nevertheless, the knowledge of these things did not decay or die out absolutely until the 18th century. Even as late as the 18th century people still spoke of something which is of extreme importance if we wish to understand the deep, deep truths that underlie the appearance of the Three Wise Men. In the 18th century, those who had still preserved some knowledge of the old Initiations spoke of the significance of the physical constellations. But not only so: they also spoke of the significance of invisible constellations. Even in the 18th century it was expressly stated in certain circles who possessed Initiation Knowledge. “There are also Stars which only the Initiate can see.” This is a true statement, and this, above all, must be taken into account if we wish to understand why it was that “Imaginations” appeared to the Shepherds, while “Stars” appeared to the Three Wise Men. Such is the indication: The Revelation came to the Shepherds inasmuch as they still had dreamlike clairvoyance in the old atavistic sense. But the Wise Men of the East had their knowledge through the ancient Science that had been handed down. Through this they knew of the relation between the Cosmos, the Heavens and the Earth. Through this they knew—could calculate, as it were—what was drawing near.

Hence we can see in the evolution of these pictures—and you will now have opportunity to observe it for yourselves—we see, with all the transition to Naturalism, the pictorial representations growing less and less adequate to the theme of the Wise Men. For the Wise Men or Magi, the most ancient and typical representations are the most fitting. For the real truth that is intended in this story is lifted right out of the earthly domain. On the other hand, the representations of Jesus grow the more intimate and tender, the more naturalistic they become. For in this case the naturalistic quality is fitting. All that goes out to meet the approaching Christ from the physical plane—all that is connected, therefore, with the life of Nature—is naturally best portrayed by such means.

We will now go on to the pictures, first of the Nativity itself and of the Adoration by the Shepherds, and then of the Three Wise Men or Kings.

2. The Nativity. (mosaic) (Palermo, Chiesa della Martorana.)

In these old compositions, as you see, everything is conceived in typical form—based on the typical representations of the ancient Myths which came over largely from the East. In a most natural way the typical representations of the Myth grew into the representations of the Christian theme. The Orpheus type, for instance, the type of the Good Shepherd, was handed down from earlier representations of Myth or Cult or Ritual, and taken to represent the new impulse, the Christ event; and so it was with many another theme and composition.

3. A Page of the Biblia Pauperum. 1st Edition. (15th century) The Nativity, etc. (German Woodcuts.)

These early Bibles generally showed parallel representations from the Old and New Testaments. They bore in mind that the New Testament is the fulfilment of the Old; this idea is brought out again and again in these “Bibles of the Poor.” The Nativity, which interests us mainly now, is shown in the middle of the page.

4. The Nativity, 11th Century. (Limburg Monestary.)

This is at Cologne. Beneath is the Flight into Egypt; the two are together in this slide. Apart from this one, we shall show the Flight into Egypt at the end of the lecture. Here you have a beautifully naive conception of the Nativity. You will feel the connection of it with what is given in the old Christmas Plays with which we are familiar. Though the latter belong, of course, to a later time, nevertheless they are from earlier Christmas Plays which are no longer extant.

5. The Flight into Egypt. (Evangeliar of the 12th century. Cathedral of Cologne.)

It is interesting to see, all around the picture, representations of what was cosmically connected with the Event, showing how they were still aware of the spiritual relationships. And now we will take the same motif as it appears in the work of Niccola Pisano.

6. Niccola Pisano. The Nativity. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

7. Giotto. The Nativity. (San Francesco. Assisi.)

You see how the representations of the theme are gradually passing into Naturalism.

8. della Robbia. The Nativity. (Hamburg. Altarpiece.) (National Museum. Florence.)

9. Meister Francke. The Nativity. (Hamburg.)

This picture is at Hamburg; I remember having seen it there myself not long ago.

10. Philippo Lippi. The Nativity. (Cathedral at Spoleto.)

You really see how in the course of time Naturalism takes hold of it more and more.

11. Piero della Francesca. The Nativity. (National Gallery. London.)

Here we are in the fifteenth century once more; and we now go on to Correggio.

12. Correggio. Holy Night. (Dresden.)

We pass again to the more Northern Masters, whose names you know. First we have a work of Schongauer' s.

13. Martin Schongauer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

Most interesting to see the Italian and the Northern Masters one after the other. In the former you still find a stronger adherence to ideal types, while here there is more individualisation—creation out of inwardness of soul, as we have seen before. Down to the tiny feet, all is pervaded with feeling, albeit the artistic perfection is not so great as in the Southern Masters.

14. Herlin. Nativity from the Altar of St. George. (Museum at Nordlingen.)

We come now to the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, to Albrecht Dürer.

15. Dürer. The Nativity. (Alto Pinakothek. Munich.)

See how the Art is taken hold of here by all that I described to you—the working out of the element of light. It is most interesting to study this in Dürer.

16. Altdorfer. The Holy Night. (Berlin.)

Altdorfer was Dürer's successor in Nuremberg.

We shall now give a series of pictures relating mainly to the Adoration by the Shepherds. First, some older Miniatures from Bible and Gospel Manuscripts.

17. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds. (Codex Egberti. Trier. 10th century.)

18. Nativity and Annunciation to the Shepherds, from Menologion of Basil II (Vatican. Rome. 11th Century.)

We go on to the Italian representations of the Adoration of the Child by the Shepherds.

19. Cimabue. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Assisi.)

With Cimabue, as you know, we find ourselves in the 13th century. We go on into the 15th and come to Ghirlandajo, the Master of whom we lately spoke.

20. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Akademia. Florence.)

Another Master of the 15th century is Piero di Cosimo.

21. Piero di Cosimo. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Berlin.)

And now we come to the Art of the Netherlands, with which we are familiar.

22. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (Uffizi. Florence.)

23. Hugo van der Goes. Adoration of the Child. (detail.)

Finally we give two works by Rembrandt.

24. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (In the Lantern Light. Etching, about 1652.)

25. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Shepherds. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

We now go on to the pictures representing the Adoration by the Three Wise Men. To begin with, an old Mosaic, of the 6th century.

26. Mosaic. Chiesa della Martotana. Palermo. Three Wise Men.

27. Mosaic. Sant Apollinare Nuovo. Ravenna.

In these older pictures the events are shown thoroughly in connection with the Spiritual World—remote from all Naturalism, lifted into a higher sphere.

28. Nativity and Adoration by the Wise Men. (Menologium Basilius. Vatican. 11th century)

29. Niccola Pisano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Baptistery at Pisa.)

This is the famous Golden Gate at Freiberg, second half of the 12th century:

30. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Freiberg. The Golden Gate.)

31. Domenico Veneziano. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Berlin.) Formerly attributed to Pisanello (Vittore Pisano).

We go on to the 15th, to Stephen Lochner:

32. Stephen Lochner. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Cathedral of Cologne.)

The next is by Gentile da Fabriano, also of the 15th century.

33. Gentile da Fabriano. Adoration of the Child. (Florence.)

34. Fra Angelico. Adoration of the Kings. (St. Marco. Florence.)

Fra Angelico is as tender and lovely in this as in all other subjects.

35. Filippo Lippi. Adoration by the Wise Men.

Whichever subject it is, you see how Naturalism progresses. This is especially interesting when one follows the treatment of one and the same subject through the centuries.

36. Sandro Botticelli. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

Now we come to the second half of the 15th century.

37. Ghirlandajo. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Spedale degli Innodenti. Florence.)

End of the 15th century:

38. Mantegna. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

39. Giorgione. The Wise Men of the East. (Vienna.)

40. Giorgione. Adoration by the Wise Men. (National Gallery. London.)

41. Giovanni Bellini. Adoration by the Kings. (Layard Gallery. London.)

And now I ask you to call to mind once more the various Dutch and Flemish Masters of whom we have spoken in a former lecture. For we now have the same subject by

42. Rogier van der Weyden. Adoration by the Kings. (Alte Pinakothek.Munich)

43. Dieric Bouts. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Piankothek. Munich.)

44. Adoration by the Wise Men, 15th centry, from the Brevarium Grimani.

We have spoken of the characte of these painters. The next is by the artist who worked in Bruges and died about 1523.

45. Gerard David. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Alte Pinakothek. Munich.)

And now the same theme treated by Leonardo.

46. Leonardo da Vinci. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Uffizi.Florence) And by his pupil,

47. Luini Bernadino. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Saronno.)

Going North again:

48. Dürer. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Uffizi. Florence.)

49. Brueghel. Adoration by the Wise Men. (Vienna.)

And finally, Rembrandt.

50. Rembrandt. Adoration by the Three Wise Men. (Buckingham Palace.)

And now we come to our last theme: the Flight into Egypt. First we have a painter of the late 15th and early 16th century.

51. Herrad von Lanndsberg. The Flight into Egypt.

52. Joachim de Patinir. Rest in the Flight. (Prado. Madrid.)

53. Correggio. Madonna della Scodella. (Parma)

The next, a little later.

54. Bernhard Strigel. The Flight into Egypt. (Stuttgart.)

Strigel painted also in Vienna, and died in 1528.

55. Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

56. Workshop of Albrecht Dürer. Resting on the Flight into Egypt.

Next is Hans Baldung or Hans Grun, going on into the 16th century.

57. Hans Balding (Baldung). Rest in the Flight. (Germanisches Museum. Nuremberg.)

58. Lucas Cranach. Rest in the Flight. (Berlin.)

Finally, Rembrandt:

59. Rembrandt. Rest in the Flight. (Etching.)

So much for today. Perhaps you will now take the opportunity to see at close quarters this impressive picture of the Wise Men which indicates so clearly the worship of the Star with the incoming of the Christ Jesus Soul.

Today I would like to approach the subject from a different angle and consider the connections that exist between the human being as a microcosmic entity and the whole macrocosm of the world, of which the human being is a part, a member, an organ, as it were. These things can be considered from the most diverse points of view, and in doing so, the most diverse relationships will come to light, which sometimes seem to contradict each other; but the contradictions consist in the fact that the matter must always be viewed from different sides.

From certain considerations that we have been making in these days, you have seen that actually man, as he relates to the world around him, mixes something of himself into his view of the world, that he actually does not take the world of sense as it is; that, as I have tried to express it drastically, he mixes into his view of the world something that rises from within, that is formed from within and that is actually a kind of transformation of the sense of smell. It is what man combines about the world in the most diverse ways, what comes out when he applies his ordinary acumen, as it is called, which comes to him through his body; one could also call it a sense of intuition. What else would be given to man if he could easily make the attempt at all - he can't even do it easily, because he can't easily switch off his intuition - if man would simply take the sensory world as it presents itself to him, without his mind, his combining mind immediately interfering in all sorts of ways.

This touches on a subject that may perhaps present some difficulties for understanding. But you can get an idea of what is actually meant if you consider how nature, the essence of a sense, comes to you. It is the same with the other senses, but the matter does not become apparent with the same clarity to the external observer, not as clearly as when you consider what is actually meant here for the sense of sight, for the eye. Consider that this eye as a physical apparatus is actually located as a fairly independent organ in the human skull and is actually only extended backwards into the human body by the appendages, the appendages of the blood vessels, the appendages of the nerves. One can say: this is the human eye, here is the extension (see drawing); but as an eye it lies here in the bony skull cavity with a great deal of independence, insofar as it is a physical apparatus. Here the lens, the incidence of the light rays, the vitreous body, so everything that is a physical apparatus is actually very independent. Only through the optic nerve, the choroid, which extends into the body, does the eye itself extend into the body, so that one can say that this eye, as a physical apparatus, insofar as it perceives the external sensory world in its visibility, is an independent organism, at least to a certain extent.

It is actually the same for every sense, it is just not so obvious for the other senses. Each sense as a sense is basically something independent, so that one can already speak of a sensory zone. It is actually surprising that the study of the senses is not enough to drive the scholars concerned to some spirituality. Because it is precisely this independence of the senses that could drive the scholars to some spirituality. Why? You see, what is experienced through the optic nerve, through the choroid, that would – and this could easily be proven with ordinary science – that would not be enough to make a person aware of what he experiences in his senses. The remarkable thing about the senses is that the etheric body projects into this purely physical apparatus, and it is a purely physical apparatus. In all our senses we are dealing with something that is outside the organism and is only experienced by the etheric body. You would not be able to unite what is caused in your eye by the incidence of light with your consciousness if you did not permeate the sense of the eye, and thus the other senses too, with your etheric body.

A ray of light falls into the eye. This ray of light has exactly the same physical effect in the eye as the ray of light in a camera obscura, in a photographic apparatus. And you only become aware of what is happening in this natural camera of the eye because your etheric body lines the eye and captures what is not captured in the mere physical apparatus by an etheric body. In the mere physical apparatus, in the mere photographic apparatus, only the physical process takes place; so that man, in the totality of his senses, really has a kind of continuation of the external world. As physical apparatus, the receiving senses, at least the majority of the receiving senses, belong more to the external world than to man. Your eye belongs much more to the external world than to your own body.

In animals, the eye belongs much more to the body than it does to humans. The fact that humans, as sensory beings, have senses that are less connected to the body than the senses of animals, makes them superior to animals. In certain lower animals, this can be demonstrated anatomically. There are all kinds of organic extensions; for example, the fan is inside in lower animals. These are very complicated formations, partly of the nerve, partly of the blood corpuscles, which the lower animals have more completely than the higher animals and especially than man.

The fact that in man the physical body takes so little part in his senses and leaves the part very much to the etheric body, that is what makes man a relatively so perfect being. So that we can say: Man is, first of all, this inner bodily man, considered physically, and the senses are inserted everywhere in him, but they are actually - as I once said in a public lecture in Zurich - like gulfs that extend into the outside world. It would be much more correct to draw it schematically like this. Instead of drawing: there is a sense, and there is a sense, and there is a sense (see drawing), it would be much more correct to draw it like this: there is the human body, and that is where the human world is built, for example the eye or the organ of smell, their continuation into the outside world, and their gulfs through the sense organs. The outer world intrudes through the senses, the eye and so on, and from the inside we only encounter it with the etheric body and permeate what the outer world sends in with our etheric body. It thereby takes part in the outer world. As a result, we are dependent on our etheric body to somehow grasp what the outer world sends in.

The fact that what I have just said is not known has meant that for more than a hundred years philosophy has been talking about nothing more fantastic than the way in which man perceives the outside world through his senses. You can get an overview of all this basically fantastic stuff by reading the chapter “The World as Illusion” in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. Because of the belief that the senses can only be understood from the inside out, from the body out, people do not understand how man can actually know something about the world through his senses. They always talk about it in this way: the world makes an impression on the senses, but then what is caused in the senses must be grasped by the soul. The truth is that the external world itself builds into us, that we therefore grasp the external world at the tip, with our etheric body grasp the external world at the tip, when we perceive the external world as human beings with our senses. Everything that Locke, Hume, Kant, the neo-Kantian philosophers of the 19th century, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Wundt and all the rest, everything that people have said about sensory perception, has been said to the exclusion of knowledge of the true conditions. As I said, you can read about it in the chapter 'The World as Illusion' in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. There you will see, in philosophical terms, the calamity that has been caused by the fact that, with the exclusion of spiritual knowledge of the matter, a giant cabbage as sense physiology actually took hold in the 19th century.

Now it is important to really understand what I just said. If you want to check to some extent the truth of what I just called a giant cabbage, it is interesting that in a certain sense what Locke, Hume, Kant, Helmholtz, Wundt and so on said about the senses is true; but curiously enough it is true for animals. Nineteenth-century man, in his quest to understand the human being through science, cannot go beyond understanding the conditions in the animal world. It is no wonder that he also stops at the animal world when it comes to the origin of man! But this is connected to much more complicated conditions. For, as I said, the etheric body touches what is called the external world of the senses at one corner. But what is the ether body in the last analysis? The ether body is ultimately that which the human being now receives from the cosmos, from the macrocosm. So that, by cutting off its ether body from the macrocosmic relationship, the macrocosm takes hold of itself in the human being through the senses. We can feel ourselves as a son of the macrocosm, in that we are an etheric body, and grasp the earthly sense world with our macrocosmic part.

The fact that this only became the case relatively late can, in turn, be proven with external science, I would like to say, with pinpoint accuracy, only that this external science cannot see the real conditions if it is not oriented by spiritual science. I have already pointed out that the Greek language does not actually have the expression that we have when we say: I see a man coming to meet us. We say: I see a man coming. The corresponding Greek expression would be: I see a coming man. In the Greco-Latin era there was still a much stronger sense that one is actually doing something when one sees or hears something, that one is grasping something with one's etheric body when one is in the sensory world. This active element is lacking in the drowsy humanity of modern times. This drowsy humanity of modern times would actually prefer to sleep through world events altogether, that is, to let them approach it as dreams. It does not want to develop the consciousness to participate when sensory perceptions occur. That is why it is so difficult to understand the Greek way of thinking today, because the Greeks had a much more active concept of the human being. They felt much more active even in what we today call the passivity of sensory perception. The Greeks would not have invented the incomplete, one-sided theory that man sleeps because he is tired; but they knew that man becomes tired when he wants to sleep, that sleeping is brought about by essentially different impulses, and that tiredness then arises from the impulse to want to sleep.

But it is not only this theory of sleep that was actually invented out of the laziness of modern man. Modern man wants to be as passive as possible, to be an active being as little as possible. He can do that, and in a sense, modern man has trained himself to be a passive being. And it is with this passivity that I presented yesterday, perhaps somewhat abruptly, the superstition, the idolatry of modern times.

So the outermost post of the external world enters into us, I would say, the outermost post of this external world. Let us draw this again schematically. Let us assume that we draw the human body here (see drawing), the outermost post of the external world enters into our body; we reach over it with our etheric body (red and blue).

You know that we actually have twelve senses; these twelve senses are therefore twelve different ways in which the external world penetrates into our body. What is it that actually penetrates into our body? That is the big question. What actually penetrates into our body?

We actually see only one side of what is penetrating; without clairvoyance we cannot turn around and look at it from the other side. With his etheric body, the human being receives the incoming ray of light or the incoming sound vibration. But it does not run from the outside into the ear according to the tone; it does not run from the outside into the eye according to the light ray. If it did, the human being would run with the sound wave, with the light beam, with the heat evolution from the outside into his sensory apparatus, as far as the senses extend from the outside. And this area is the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form.

So if you could turn around so that you could follow what is entering here through the senses (arrows), you would be in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form. You can see how the beings of the world are intimately intertwined. We walk through the world as human beings, opening our senses and actually carrying the exusiai, the spirits of form, within us, which reveal themselves to us as we open our senses to the external world. This world of exusiai, the spiritual world, is thus hidden behind the veil of the sensory world. But this world of the Exusiai, which is hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, the world that reveals itself in man, also has a universal cosmic side, because it permeates the cosmos. That which enters our senses vibrates and undulates throughout the cosmos. So that we can say, this area that projects into our senses is not only there in the senses, but also has its manifestation out in the world. What is it there? There are the planets that belong to our solar system.

Truly, the connection of the planets of our solar system forms a body that belongs to a spiritual being, and this spiritual being includes the exusiai, which are manifested in the revelations of our senses and which have their objective side out in the universe, in the planets. And embedded in all that is, embedded in this whole stream of exusiai activity, are other beings. They lie behind these Exusiai. I would like to say that other beings do not penetrate as far as the Exusiai do. They are out there in the same area, but they do not come close to us (see drawing): these are the beings of the hierarchy of the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi.

They are all already present in that which is revealed in our senses, but man cannot take this up into his consciousness. It has an effect on him, but he cannot take it up into his consciousness. So you can say: Through our senses we encounter a world - the realm of the exusiai with the planetary system (red, blue, orange, see drawing on p. 97), and embedded in this whole realm is also the hierarchy of the archai, the archangeloi, the angeloi. These are, so to speak, the ministers of the exusiai. But the human being perceives only the outer appearance of all this; he perceives only the sensory tapestry spread out before him.

This is how it is with what is outside of us. It is different again with what is inside us, now also physically inside us. After hearing what is adjacent to our senses, you can go and ask: What is located directly behind our senses inwards? — We have seen: the eye continues inwards in the optic nerve. All the senses continue inward in their corresponding nerve. When the senses continue inward in this way, you get a wonderful structure from the twelve senses inward. It is very complicated. You could simplify it by saying: twelve strands to the inside, twelve sensory spheres; so on the outside the sensory zone, connected to it what the senses now send inward.

This is a very complicated structure. How does it come about when we look at the human being as a macrocosmic being? That which lies behind the senses inwards comes from the Dynamis, from the Spirits of Movement. So that, going further inwards, the deeds of the Dynamis, the Spirits of Movement, join the senses here (see drawing on p. 97). You could not think if the spirits of movement did not work on the thinking apparatus, which is the continuation of the sense apparatus. If you look outward, you see the Exusiai making the natural order. You see these Exusiai approaching people with their servants, the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi. But when you think of your inner being, you must remember that you owe this inner being to the spirits of the movement, who prepare the thinking apparatus for you as a continuation of your sense apparatus inwards; not the combining apparatus, which is a mere transformation of the sense of smell, but the thinking apparatus, which man does not use at all in ordinary physical life. For man uses the sense of smell, the sense of smell merely transformed. He has already ceased to use the sense sphere; he would think quite differently if he could really use the twelve inward continuations of the sense sphere.

In the brain, for example, the visual sphere lies behind the frontal lobe, which is essentially a reworked organ of smell. Man hardly uses it, he only thinks habitually through the olfactory sphere. He uses it in a reworked form by combining. If he were to use it directly, he would switch off his forebrain, this forebrain that is only prepared for the external sensory world, and think with the direct, with the four-hill section, with the visual section, where it enters the brain. Then he would have imaginations.

It is the same with the other senses. Man also has imaginations in the physical world, because one world always extends into the other. But man does not recognize these imaginations in the physical world as real imaginations: they are in fact olfactory imaginations. What a person smells is actually the only imaginative realm in the ordinary sensory life. But a much nobler imaginative realm could, for example, come from the sphere of vision and from other sensory spheres.

Looking inwards, we find the Spirits of Movement. And going further inwards, we come to the regions which do not dominate thinking but feeling, the organs of feeling, which are mostly glandular organs in reality. These organs are the deeds of the Spirits that we call the Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Wisdom. We are sentient beings because the Spirits of Wisdom work in us. We are volitional beings because the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, work in us. Located even further inward, the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, work on the organs of our will (see diagram on p. 97).

Just as the exusiai, the spirits of form, have their macrocosmic body in the planets, which, as it were, present the outer visible side to us for ordinary consciousness, so the spirits of movement have their outer side, strangely enough, but it is so, in the fixed stars. Only the dead person between death and a new birth can see their inner side; this is the spiritual side, seen from the other side. In contrast, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones no longer have external visibility at all; they are spiritual in nature. It can be said that they lie behind the planets and behind the fixed stars. And as the deceased looks down on what affects the person in human feeling and human will, the deceased constantly looks at the Kyriotetes, at the Thrones. What I have told you, that the dead person has a connection with the people with whom he is karmically connected, is conveyed to him by the Kyriotetes and by the thrones. The dead person looks into the sphere that invisibly works outside in the objective world and actually only becomes visible in its creature, in human feeling and in human will. What people feel and will here shines up to the dead, and the dead says: In the body of Dynamis, in the body of Kyriotetes, in the body of the thrones, the thinking, feeling and willing of people shines. Just as we look up at the stars, the dead look down into the earthly sphere, into the human sphere. Only, we look at the mineral aspect of the stars, the external physical; the dead do not see the external physical of the glands, the organs of movement, and thus also of the blood, but instead see the spiritual side, the Kyriotetes, the thrones. Just as we look up at the sky, seeing its visible meaning from the outside, the dead person looks down to see the firmament of humanity. The spiritual of this firmament appears to him. That is the dead person's secret.

You see what reciprocity reigns in the universe. When you recognize this reciprocity, the human being takes on a strange countenance! Strangely enough, it takes on the countenance that you say to yourself: We look up at the stars, seek the spirits of form in their exterior in the planets, the spirits of movement in the fixed stars; then that in the distant perspectives fades into the spirit. From this sphere the dead person looks down, looks at that which the human being dreamily oversleeps here. But in that he sees his beyond; there the spirit stars shine up into his world. And the human being is embedded in this being.

What is said in the first scenes of the mystery “The Testing of the Soul” is given a peculiar illumination. Read these first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul', the words of Capesius, and you will see that from the ethical point of view everything is said there that is now being said, so to speak, from the point of view of celestial knowledge. The way in which this celestial knowledge can work in the consciousness of man is pointed out in the first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul'.

And then come the higher worlds, if one wants to apply the word 'higher', that which lies beyond the human being and this universe. I will try to present this schematically, but I must appeal to your goodwill to understand. We can say that if there is a kind of boundary here (see also the drawing on p. 97, yellow), the world of the planets, the world of the fixed stars, loses itself here into the spiritual – and from the other side it comes again. So that here we have the sphere of human will, the sphere of feeling, there the Spirits of Wisdom appear. There we have this order.

But now you can think of an order that is common to both, where man and the universe are included, where we are embedded in such a way that on the one hand we, who shine up to the dead, and on the other hand the starry sky, which shines down to us, are embedded in it. Then we come to the hierarchies, which, if you want to use the word, are higher than the thrones: to the cherubim and seraphim. You can imagine that from this point of view, which has now been mentioned, one cannot speak of the physical exteriors of the cherubim and seraphim, because they are of course even higher spirits; but they are already so spiritual — here I really must appeal to your very good will to understand — they are already so spiritual, these cherubim and seraphim, that their effect comes from another, quite unknown side.

Is it not true that the exusiai, the spirits of form, can be perceived directly by the senses in the planets; that is simply the side they turn towards us. The spirits of movement are directly perceptible in the fixed stars; that is the side they turn towards us. But the cherubim and seraphim are not perceptible to the senses in such a way that they turn their other side towards us, so to speak. But they are so imperceptible that the imperceptibility itself becomes perceptible. So that which lives in the world through cherubim and seraphim is so imperceptible that imperceptibility itself is perceived. It withdraws so strongly from human consciousness that man notices this withdrawal from consciousness.

Thus we can say: the cherubim do in fact reappear, even if this is manifested in such a way that they are so deeply hidden that one perceives their hiddenness. The cherubim appear not only symbolically, but quite objectively in what takes place in the thundercloud, in what takes place when a planet is ruled by volcanic forces. And the seraphim truly appear in what flashes as lightning from the cloud, or in what manifests as fire in the volcanic eruptions, in such a way that their very imperceptibility in these gigantic effects of nature becomes perceptible.

Therefore, in ancient times, when people saw through such things, they looked up at the starry sky, which revealed the most diverse things to them: the secrets of the Exusiai, the secrets of Dynamis. Then they tried to reveal the higher secrets in what man today ridicules: from the interior of the human body - as one says trivially - from the bowels. But then they were aware that the greatest effects, which are really common to the solar system, announce themselves from a completely opposite side in the effects of fire and thunderstorms, in earthquakes and volcanic effects. The most creative aspect of the seraphim and cherubim is announced through its most destructive side, curiously enough. It is precisely the other side, it is the absolute negative, but the spiritual is so spiritually strong that even its imperceptibility, its non-existence, is perceived by the senses.

There you have placed man back into the macrocosm. And at the same time you can see that in this whole macrocosm there is something that begins with the cherubim and goes up to themselves, and that only, I would say, reflects, shadows itself in the gigantic effects that we have just mentioned. This gives you the perspective of a natural science that is at the same time a spiritual science; it gives you the perspective of a science that really sees the whole universe as spirit, that is not content with a vague pantheism and other “pantheisms”, but that really goes into what lies at the basis of the universe as spiritual.

These things will also make it clear to you that man must have a dual nature in a certain respect. Let us take man as he lives from waking to sleeping; he lives in his senses, in the sensual environment, if one perceives the outside as I have indicated. But the other part of a person lives between falling asleep and waking up. It is only so imperfect in the present human cycle that a person is not aware of what he experiences during sleep. But during sleep, a person experiences his being with the cosmos, with the extraterrestrial cosmos, just as he experiences his coexistence with the earthly cosmos with his senses while awake. The only difference is that he is unaware of the other coexistence, the coexistence with the extraterrestrial cosmos. The moment you fall asleep, you join in the movements of the cosmos spiritually, you enter into a completely different sphere. You make yourself ready when you wake up; you make yourself flexible in relation to the cosmos by falling asleep. You live the life of the cosmos by falling asleep; you tear yourself out of the cosmos by waking up. So that you can say: Man can recognize in his own nature, in his own being, a part that swims in the cosmos, that lives in the cosmos. If the ancient astrologer, in the sense in which it was meant in the last reflections, explored the cosmos with its secrets, he explored that in which man swims with that part of his being that sleeps. Man swims with that which the astrologer tries to explore, the real astrologer, not the merely calculating, mathematical one of modern times.

In the moment when the human being sees what he experiences with the part of his being that sleeps, in that moment he stands before what, roughly until the 15th century, was actually called nature. What the human being experiences there was called nature. The Greeks called the same thing that was called nature in the Middle Ages, Proserpina, Persephone. Of course, the mysteries of Persephone were described differently in Greece and in the Middle Ages. But you can see that the Middle Ages knew these things when you read descriptions of nature and its secrets as found in the works of Bernardus Silvestris. In the work 'De mundi universitate' by Bernardus Silvestris, the description begins of the experiences that man has when he awakens to the part that participates in the cosmos, which is otherwise overslept.

These things are particularly well described by Alanus ab Insulis, from the area we have mentioned several times; for in Alanus ab Insulis's 'Island', he means Ireland, Hybernia. In his work 'De planctu naturae' and in his 'Anticlaudianus', you will find parallels to the Proserpina myth and what he has to say about nature. And you will find that everything is resurrected in the great teacher of Dante, whom I once mentioned here, in Brunetto Latini. You will find the teachings of Brunetto Latini incorporated into Dante's own ideas. Read the parts of the Divine Comedy in which Dante describes the Matelda, the part that really resembles the Proserpina myth like two peas in a pod, which even the outer science has already noticed. You will acquire an awareness of it – from Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, from Brunetto Latini and from Dante, you can acquire an awareness, from many others as well - as until the times when the new era dawned, people had an awareness of that other world of the coexistence of man as a microcosm with the macrocosm.

On the one hand, there was nature, the human being's experience of the cosmos, which the Middle Ages called Natura and which antiquity called Proserpina. This was personified and distinguished from Urania, who rules over the celestial sphere just as nature rules over what the human being experiences from falling asleep to waking up. And these medieval people believed they saw a deep secret when they spoke of the marriage of nature in man with the nus, with the mind, with the intellect in man. And in a right and wrong way, these people tried to experience in man the marriage of nature with the Nus, with the mind or intellect, as a mystical wedding, which was contrasted with the alchemical wedding, as I described in the essay that is the first about Christian Rosenkreutz.

These are things that are not so infinitely far behind us. And Dante's haunting work - which on the one hand describes the world and man, the human secrets, with as much sublimity as humor - is like the work that wanted to preserve what has been known for centuries and millennia about man's connection to the macrocosm. In Brunetto Latini we find the same thing that Dante describes in his own poetic way, from the point of view of initiation, also linked to an external event.

The consciousness of the connection between man and these spiritual secrets had to be hidden for a time, so to speak, so that what man can experience when it is separated out from the universe and, as it were, dependent on itself, could be kindled in man. We are now living in the age in which, on the one hand, man is exposed to the radiations that permeate him from Pisces, but on the other hand, he is exposed to the radiations of the differently acting, opposite constellation of Virgo. But this age must find the way out of spiritual infertility. Of course, we can no longer simply take over what humanity once knew, because that knowledge was in a form that was useful for ancient humanity. Dante's “Divine Comedy” is, although a great revelation, more a testament of a bygone era. A new era needs the revelations of the spiritual cosmos from a different source.

But one thing is possible. When one considers that, I might say, people knew spiritual secrets until a few centuries ago, this has such an effect on the human mind that it can inspire him to seek the way to these secrets in a new way. Therefore, we can also draw impulses from historical observation; only we must take this historical observation in such a way that we go back to what is really historical. Consider what all the external events related in history are worth – in this history, with which, lamentably, our schoolchildren up to the oldest are pampered – what these stories, which are recorded as history, are worth compared to the facts that people like Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, Brunetto Latini, Dante and so on, Pico de Mirandola, Fludd , and even Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, if we take a certain sphere of wisdom, and right up to the 18th century we could cite the disciple of Jakob Böhme, Saint-Martin — what are the usual events recorded in history compared to the facts that there were people who carried such cosmic knowledge within them and worked with such cosmic knowledge! Yes, the present is often proud of what it has achieved. This present-day intelligentsia – I mentioned it in connection with the Christmas plays today – has always been quite dismissive of the spiritual content; even when this intelligentsia, as in Oberufer, where the Christmas plays were performed until the middle of the 19th century, consisted of a single personality, the schoolmaster, who was also the village notary, and thus the legal personality and at the same time the mayor. He was the intellectual, he was the only enemy of all the Christmas plays. In his opinion, they were stupid, foolish. Schröer still experienced this, that the intelligentsia of Oberufer was hostile to what was in the Christmas plays. It is very often the intelligentsia that is hostile to what is actually fruitful in human evolution.

It is a matter of encouraging that which may be called the enthusiasm of history by looking at real history, by really immersing oneself in what history is. The spiritual part of the event also belongs to history, and it proceeds differently than the external physical-material part.

Especially in the harsh present, we must try again and again to stimulate the spiritual impulses by making ourselves aware of how spirit has ruled in the historical development of humanity. Whether you can count the details on the fingers of one hand: That is how the Dynamis work, that is how the Exusiai work — that is much less important than awakening this overall consciousness, how it wants to bring the individual human being together with the spirit of humanity. For in the awakening of this consciousness lies that which is to bring salvation into the evolution of mankind. Sometimes it is good to realize how far removed what passes as world opinion today is from what moves human souls, or at least seems to move them. As a result, there is often no sense of the weight of the individual facts. The spirit weighs the facts correctly.

More important than many other things for the assessment of the present – just think about it with the help of what you have heard here – more important than many other things is the news that came in the last few days that the American state administration has taken the railways into self-government. For this is one of a number of symptoms that clearly point to things that are being prepared in order to divert humanity as far as possible from the path along which it can only be preserved if it becomes fully aware that without spirit reality can only be a dying reality. One can indeed choose to die; then life must flee from the areas for which one chooses to die to other areas. The field of truth already carries the victory. But one looks at a field where, so to speak, those who look deeper into the world are also confronted with such powers of a left and a right, as Dante at the starting point of his description of his “Divine Comedy”, or as Brunetto Latini at the beginning of his initiation.

Oh, it would be so necessary for the world to grasp thoughts of spirituality in the broadest sense! Instead of this, it is true, we are only faced with the necessity of having to emphasize again and again that we must look towards the spirit. Again and again we are faced with the longing to be able to emphasize the seriousness of the matter sufficiently. People do not want to see where germs are, but they want to be passive, to let things happen to them if possible, to sleep through the course of the world if possible. If many people did not sleep as they do in the present, oversleeping events, then one would see that behind what is now buzzing through the world in such an untrue way, there is a strange tendency. It may well be said, since Woodrow Wilson, the universal idol of modern times, of the present time, of the present, has boasted of such things himself, that four-fifths of humanity is facing one-fifth. This idol of modern humanity, who has been raised to the altar much more than one might think, has indeed boasted of this himself.

It will have to be said that it would be a shame if humanity were to oversleep what lies in such an ideal as the ideal of this idol, whose slogans, even those that are not copied from the brave Don Pedro of 1864 like its last manifestation, but rather grew in its own hollow—pardon me, I mean head—go back to what is actually inherent in it as a tendency. What is it then? The aim is to be able to say one day on earth: centuries ago there was a legendary humanity in the middle of Europe; they managed to wipe it out. They had to be wiped out because they were terribly proud. They descended from the gods and even called the main poet Goethe to suggest that they had received a spirit directly from the gods. Although we shall not express ourselves in such spiritual terms, the germ or tendency of Wilsonianism will be recognizable in this. It will only be a matter of whether this can be the path of humanity, whether this can be the future path of the earth, or whether we should not rather reflect on how the earth can be saved from the so-called ideals of Wilsonianism and similar things. One need not fall into nationalism or anti-nationalism with such things. The phrases of nations and the freedom of nations can also be left to Wilsonianism in modern times. But one cannot point out seriously enough what is actually behind the idol that is meant.

I know that present-day humanity will not give much credence to such things, but I also know that in the future many a voice will be raised in agreement with what has been said here. May the voices of the future always be added to those of the past: Humanity allowed itself to be led in all sorts of ways by a strange idol; thank the world spirits that the goals of this strange leader of humanity were not fulfilled, who, after all, also to the world by theoretically proclaiming, in grand words, the republic as the only true form of government and by copying out his own republican manifestos from the Brazilian emperor of 1864. The fact that one is actually standing here before a grotesque phenomenon is something that can be said within closed walls. Outside, truth is not the highest value, but is weighed on the political scales. One must not say what is true or not true, but what is prescribed. Until March 15, one was not allowed to say anything against tsarism in the various countries; since March 15, one is of course allowed to say anything against it.

Unfortunately, truth is not the highest standard. But to speak out against it is the only way to touch the conditions that are necessary to write into the soul today. It makes sense to add to the great views into the cosmos the small thoughts that passive, sleepy humanity has today, but which unfortunately have great effects on deeds. For humanity must awaken, and the spirit must be the awakener.

[ 1 ] I could not at that time bring myself to reflections concerning public life in Austria which might have taken a deeper hold in any way whatever upon my mind. I merely continued to observe the extraordinarily complicated relationships involved. Expressions which won my deeper interest I could find only in connection with Karl Julius Schröer. I had the pleasure of being with him often just at this time. His own fate was closely bound up with that of German Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Tobias Schröer, who conducted a German school in Presburg and wrote dramas as well as books on historical and aesthetic subjects. The last appeared under the name Christian Oeser, and they were favourite text-books. The poetic writings of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, although they are doubtless significant and received marked recognition within restricted circles, did not become widely known. The sentiment that breathes through them was opposed to the dominant political current in Hungary. They had to be published in part without the author's name in German regions outside of Hungary. Had the tendencies of the author's mind been known in Hungary, he would have risked, not only dismissal from his post, but also severe punishment.

[ 2 ] Karl Julius Schröer thus experienced the impulse toward Germanism even as a young man in his own home. Under this impulse he developed his intimate devotion to the German nature and German literature as well as a great devotion to everything belonging to Goethe or concerning him. The history of German poetry by Gervinus had a profound influence upon him. [ 3 ] He went in the fortieth year of the nineteenth century to Germany to pursue his studies in the German language and literature at the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin. After his return he was occupied in teaching German literature in his father's school, and in conducting a Seminar. He now became acquainted with the Christmas folk-plays which were enacted every year by the German colonists in the region of Presburg. There he was face to face with Germanism in a form profoundly congenial to him. The roving Germans who had come from the west into Hungary hundreds of years before had brought with them these plays of the old home, and continued to perform them as they had done at the Christmas festival in regions which no doubt lay in the neighbourhood of the Rhine. The Paradise story, the birth of Christ, the coming of the three kings were alive in popular form in these plays. Schröer then published them, as he heard them, or as he read them in old manuscripts that he was able to see at peasants' homes, using the title Deutsche Weinachtspiele aus Ungarn.¹

[ 4 ] The delightful experience of living in the German folk life took an even stronger hold upon Schröer's mind. He made journeys in order to study German dialects in the most widely separated parts of Austria. Wherever the German folk was scattered in the Slavic, Magyar, or Italian geographical regions, he wished to learn their individuality. Thus came into being his glossary and grammar of the Zipser dialect, which was native to the south of the Carpathians; of the Gottschze dialect, which survived with a little fragment of German folk in Krain; the language of the Heanzen, which was spoken in western Hungary.

[ 5 ] For Schröer these studies were never merely a scientific task. He lived with his whole soul in the revelation of the folk-life, and wished by word and writing to bring its nature to the consciousness of those men who have been uprooted from it by life. He was then a professor in Budapest. There he could not feel at home in the presence of the prevailing current of thought; so he removed to Vienna, where at first he was entrusted with the direction of the evangelical schools, and where he later became a professor of the German language and literature. When he already occupied this position, I had the privilege of knowing him and of becoming intimate with him. At the time when this occurred, his whole sentiment and life were directed toward Goethe. He was engaged in editing the second part of Faust, and writing an introduction for this, and had already published the first part.

[ 6 ] When I went to call at Schröer's little library, which was also his work-room, I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere in the highest degree beneficial to my mental life. I understood at once why Schröer was maligned by those who accepted the prevailing literary-historical methods on account of his writings, and especially on account of his Geschichte der Deutschen Dichtung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.² He did not write at all like the members of the Scherer school, who treated literary phenomena after the fashion of investigators in natural science. He had certain sentiments and ideas concerning literary phenomena, and he spoke these out in frank, manly fashion without turning his eyes much at the moment of writing to the “sources.” It had even been said that he had written his exposition “from the wrist out.”

[ 7 ] This interested me very little. I experienced a spiritual warmth when I was with him. I could sit by his side for hours. Out of his inspired heart the Christmas plays lived on his lips, the spirit of the German dialect, the course of the life of literature. The relation between dialect and cultured speech became perceptible to me in a practical way. I experienced a real joy when he spoke to me, as he had already done in his lectures, of the poet of the Lower Austrian dialect, Joseph Misson, who wrote the splendid poem, Da Naaz, a niederösterreichischer Bauernbua, geht ind Fremd.³ Schröer then constantly gave me books from his library in which I could pursue further what was the content of this conversation. I always had, in truth, when I sat there alone with Schröer, the feeling that still another was present – Goethe's spirit. For Schröer lived so strongly in the spirit and the work of Goethe that in every sentiment or idea which entered his soul he feelingly asked the question, “Would Goethe have felt or thought thus?”

[ 8 ] I listened in a spiritual sense with the greatest possible sympathy to everything that came from Schröer. Yet I could not do otherwise even in his presence than build up independently in my own mind that toward which I was striving in my innermost spirit. Schröer was an idealist, and the world of ideas as such was for him that which worked as a propulsive force in the creation of nature and of man. I then found it indeed difficult to express in words for myself the difference between Schröer's way of thinking and mine. He spoke of ideas as the propelling forces in history. He felt life in the idea itself. For me the life of the spirit was behind the ideas, and these were only the phenomena of that life in the human soul. I could then find no other terms for my way of thinking than “objective idealism.” I wished thereby to denote that for me the reality is not in the idea; that the idea appears in man as the subject, but that just as colour appears on a physical object, so the idea appears on the spiritual object, and that the human mind – the subject – perceives it there as the eye perceives colour on a living being.

[ 9 ] My conception, however, Schröer very largely satisfied in the form of expression he used when we talked about that which reveals itself as “folk-soul.” He spoke of this as of a real spiritual being which lives in the group of individual men who belong to a folk. In this matter his words took on a character which did not pertain merely to the designation of an idea abstractly held. And thus we both observed the texture of ancient Austria and the individualities of the several folk-souls active in Austria. From this side it was possible for me to conceive thoughts concerning the state of public life which penetrated more deeply into my mind.

[ 10 ] Thus my experience at that time was strongly bound up with my relationship to Karl Julius Schröer. What, however, were more remote from him, and in which I strove most of all for an inner explanation, were the natural sciences. I wished to know that my “objective idealism” was in harmony with the knowledge of nature.

[ 11 ] It was during the period of my most earnest intercourse with Schröer that the question of the relation between the spiritual and natural worlds came before my mind in a new form. This happened at first quite independently of Goethe's way of thought concerning the natural sciences. For even Schröer could tell me nothing distinctive concerning this realm of Goethe's creative work. He was happy whenever he found in one or another natural scientist a generous recognition of Goethe's observations concerning the beings of plants and animals. As regards Goethe's theory of colour, however, he was met on all sides by natural scientific conceptions utterly opposed. So in this direction he developed no special opinion.

[ 12 ] My relationship to natural science was not at this time of my life influenced from this side, in spite of the fact that in my intercourse with Schröer I came into close touch with Goethe's spiritual life. It was determined much more by the difficulties I experienced when I had to think out the facts of optics in the sense of the physicist.

[ 13 ] I found that light and sound were thought of in an analogy which is invalid. The expressions “sound in general” and “light in general” were used. The analogy lay in the following: The individual tones and sounds were viewed as specially modified air-vibrations; and objective sound, outside of the human perception, was viewed as a state of vibration of the air. Light was thought of similarly. That which occurs outside of man when he has a perception by means of phenomena caused by light was defined as vibration in ether. The colours, then, are especially formed ether-vibrations. These analogies became at that time an actual torment to my inner life. For I believed myself perfectly clear in the perception that the concept “sound” is merely an abstract union of the individual occurrences in the sphere of sound; whereas “light” signifies a concrete thing over against the phenomena in the sphere of illumination. “Sound” was for me a composite abstract concept; “light” a concrete reality. I said to myself that light is really not perceived by the senses; “colours” are perceived by means of light, which manifests itself everywhere in the perception of colours but is not itself sensibly perceived. “White” light is not light, but that also is a colour. [ 14 ] Thus for me light became a reality in the sense-world, yet in itself not perceptible to the senses. Now there came before my mind the conflict between nominalism and realism as this was developed within scholasticism. The realists maintained that concepts were realities which lived in things and were simply reproduced out of these by human understanding. The nominalists maintained, on the contrary, that concepts were merely names formed by man which include together a complex of what is in the things, but names which have no existence themselves. It now seemed to me that the sound experience must be viewed in the nominalist manner and the experiences which proceed from light in the realist manner.

[ 15 ] I carried this orientation into the optics of the physicist. I had to reject much in this science. Then I arrived at perceptions which gave me a way to Goethe's colour theory.

On this side the door opened before me through which to approach Goethe's writings on natural science. I first took to Schröer brief treatises I had written on the basis of my views in the field of natural science. He could make but little of them; for they were not yet worked out on the basis of Goethe's way of thinking, but I had merely attached at the end this remark: “When men come to the point of thinking about nature as I have here set forth, then only will Goethe's researches in science be confirmed.” Schröer felt an inner pleasure when I made such a statement, but beyond this nothing then came of the matter. The situation in which I then found myself comes out in the following: Schröer related to me one day that he had spoken with a colleague who was a physicist. But, said the man, Goethe opposed himself to Newton, and Newton was “such a genius”; to which Schröer replied: But Goethe “also was a genius.” Thus again I felt that I had a riddle to solve with which I struggled entirely alone.

[ 16 ] In the views at which I had arrived in the physics of optics there seemed to me to be a bridge between what is revealed to insight into the spiritual world and that which comes out of researches in the natural sciences. I felt then a need to prove to sense experience, by means of certain experiments in optics in a form of my own, the thoughts which I had formed concerning the nature of light and that of colour.

It was not easy for me to buy the things needed for such experiments; for the means of living I derived from tutoring was little enough. Whatever was in any way possible for me I did in order to arrive at such plans of experimentation in the theory of light as would lead to an unprejudiced insight into the facts of nature in this field.

[ 17 ] With the physicist's usual arrangements for experiments I was familiar through my work in Reitlinger's physics laboratory. The mathematical treatment of optics was easy to me, for I had already pursued thorough courses in this field. In spite of all objections raised by the physicists against Goethe's theory of colour, I was driven by my own experiments farther and farther away from the customary attitude of the physicist toward Goethe. I became aware that all such experimentation is only the establishing of certain facts “about light” – to use an expression of Goethe's – and not experimentation with light itself. I said to myself: “The colours are not, in Newton's way of thinking, produced out of light; they come to manifestation when obstructions hinder the free unfolding of the light.” It seemed to me that this was the lesson to be learned directly from my experiments. [ 18 ] Through this, however, light was for me removed from the properly physical realities. It took its place as a midway stage between the realities perceptible to the senses and those visible to the spirit.

[ 19 ] I was not inclined forthwith to engage in a merely philosophical course of thinking about these things. But I held strongly to this: to read the facts of nature aright. And then it became constantly clearer to me how light itself does not enter the realm of the sense-perceptible, but remains on the farther side of this, while colours appear when the sense perceptible is brought into the realm of light. [ 20 ] I now felt myself compelled anew to press inward to the understanding of nature from the most diverse directions. I was led again to the study of anatomy and physiology. I observed the members of the human, animal, and plant organisms in their formations. In this study I came in my own way to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. I became more and more aware how that conception of nature which is attainable through the senses penetrates through to that which was visible to me in spiritual fashion.

[ 21 ] If in this spiritual way I directed my look to the soul-activity of man, thinking, feeling, and willing, then the “spiritual man” took form for me, a clearly visible image. I could not linger in the abstractions in which men generally think when they speak of thinking, feeling, and willing. In these living manifestations I saw creative forces which set “the man as spirit” there before me. If I then turned my glance to the sense-manifestation of man, this became complete to my observation by means of the spirit-form which ruled in the sense-perceptible.

[ 22 ] I came upon the sensible-supersensible form of which Goethe speaks and which thrusts itself, both for the true natural vision and for the spiritual vision, between what the senses grasp and what the spirit perceives.

[ 23 ] Anatomy and physiology struggled through step by step to the sensible-supersensible form. And in this struggling I through my look fell, at first in a very imperfect way, upon the threefold organization of the human being, concerning which – after having pursued my studies regarding this for thirty years in silence – I first began to speak openly in my book Von Seelenrätzeln.⁴ It then became clear to me that in that portion of the human organization in which the shaping is chiefly directed to the elements of the nerves and the senses, the sensible-supersensible form also stamps itself most strongly in the sense-perceptible. The head organization appeared to me as that in which the sensible-supersensible becomes most strongly visible in the sensible form. On the other hand, I was forced to look upon the organization consisting of the limbs as that in which the sensible-supersensible most completely submerges itself, so that in this organization the forces active in nature external to man pursue their work in the shaping of the human body. Between these poles of the human organization everything seemed to me to exist which expresses itself in a rhythmic manner, the processes of breathing, circulation, and the like. [ 24 ] At that time I found no one to whom I could have spoken of these perceptions. If I referred here or there to something of this, then it was looked upon at once as the result of a philosophic idea, whereas I was certain that I had disclosed these things to myself by means of an understanding drawn from unbiased anatomical and physiological experimentation.

[ 25 ] For the mood which depressed my soul by reason of this isolation in my perceptions I found an inner release only when I read over and over the conversation which Goethe had with Schiller as the two went away from a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena. They were both agreed in the view that nature should not be observed in such piece-meal fashion as had been done in the paper of the botanist Batsch which they had heard read. And Goethe with a few strokes drew before Schiller's eyes his “archetypal plant.” This through a sensible-supersensible form represents the plant as a whole out of which leaf, blossom, etc., reproducing the whole in detail, shape themselves. Schiller, because he had not yet overcome his Kantian point of view, could see in this “whole” only an “idea” which human understanding formed through observation of the details. Goethe would not allow this to pass. He saw spiritually the whole as he saw with his senses the group of details, and he admitted no difference in principle between the spiritual and the sensible perception, but only a transition from the one to the other. To him it was clear that both had the right to a place in the reality of experience. Schiller, however, did not cease to maintain that the archetypal plant was no experience, but an idea. Then Goethe replied, in his way of thinking, that in this case he perceived his ideas with his eyes. [ 26 ] There was for me a rest after a long struggle in my mind, in that which came to me out of the understanding of these words of Goethe, to which I believed I had penetrated Goethe's perception of nature revealed itself before my mind as a spiritual perception.

[ 27 ] Now, by reason of an inner necessity, I had to strive to work in detail through all of Goethe's scientific writings. At first I did not think of undertaking an interpretation of these writings, such as I soon afterward published in an introduction to them in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur. I thought much more of setting forth independently some field or other of natural science in the way in which this science now hovered before me as “spiritual.” [ 28 ] My external life was at that time not so ordered that I could accomplish this. I had to do tutoring in the most diverse subjects. The “pedagogical” situations through which I had to find my way were complex enough. For example, there appeared in Vienna a Prussian officer who for some reason or other had been forced to leave the German military service. He wished to prepare himself to enter the Austrian army as an officer of engineers. Through a peculiar course of fate I became his teacher in mathematics and physical-scientific subjects. I found in this teaching the deepest satisfaction; for my “scholar” was an extraordinarily lovable man who formed a human relationship with me when we had put behind us the mathematical and scientific developments he needed for his preparation. In other cases also, as in those of students who had completed their work and who were preparing for doctoral examinations, I had to give the instruction, especially in mathematics and the physical sciences.

[ 29 ] Because of this necessity of working again and again through the physical sciences of that time, I had ample opportunity of immersing myself in the contemporary views in these fields. In teaching I could give out only these views; what was most important to me in relation to the knowledge of nature I had still to carry locked up within myself.

[ 30 ] My activity as a tutor, which afforded me at that time the sole means of a livelihood, preserved me from one-sidedness. I had to learn many things from the foundation up in order to be able to teach them. Thus I found my way into the “mysteries” of book-keeping, for I found opportunity to give instruction even in this subject.

[ 31 ] Moreover, in the matter of pedagogical thought, there came to me from Schröer the most fruitful stimulus. He had worked for years as director of the Evangelical schools in Vienna, and he had set forth his experiences in the charming little book, Unterrichtsfrage.⁵ What I read in this could then be discussed with him. In regard to education and instruction, he spoke often against the mere imparting of information, and in favour of the evolution of the full and entire human being.

• 1. German Christmas Plays from Hungary.
• 2. History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.
• 3. Ignatius, a peasant boy of Lower Austria, goes abroad.
• 4. Riddles of the Soul.
• 5. Questions on Teaching.

To turn our minds to thoughts connected with the Whitsun festival seems to me less appropriate during these grave days¹ than would have been the case in earlier years. For mankind is passing through fateful ordeals and at such times it is not really fitting to call up feelings of inner warmth and exhilaration. If our feelings are right and true we can never for a single moment forget the suffering that is now so universal, and in a certain sense it is actually selfish to wish to forget it in order to give ourselves up to thoughts that warm and uplift the soul. It will therefore be more fitting to-day to speak of certain matters bearing on the needs of the age, for our recent studies have shown very clearly that many of the reasons for the sufferings of the present time lie in the prevailing attitude to the spiritual, and that it is vitally urgent to work for the development of the human soul in order that mankind may go forward to better days. Nevertheless I want at least to start with thoughts which will bring home to us the meaning of a festival such as Whitsun.

There are three festivals of main importance in the course of the year: Christmas, Easter, Whitsun. Everyone who has not become indifferent, as is the case with the majority of our contemporaries, to the significance of such festivals in the evolution of the world and of humanity will at once perceive the contrasts between these three festivals, for the difference in the kind of experiences associated with each is expressed in their outer symbolism. Christmas is a festival connected above all with the joys of childhood, a festival in which a part is usually, if not always, played by the Christmas Tree brought into the house from snow-clad nature outside. Our thought also turns to the Christmas Plays so often performed among us and which for centuries have brought uplift to the simplest human hearts at this season by reminding them of the great and unique event in earth-evolution when Jesus of Nazareth, or, to be quite exact, Jesus who came from Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. The festival of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a festival connected with a world of feeling engendered by the Gospel of St. Luke, by those parts of the Gospel which make the most general appeal to simple hearts and are the easiest to understand. It is therefore a festival of universal humanity, intelligible, to a certain extent at least, even to the child and to men who have preserved a childlike quality of heart and mind. Yet it brings to such childlike hearts something great and mighty which then becomes part of their consciousness.

The Easter festival, although it is celebrated during the season when nature is waking to life, leads our minds to the portal of death. By contrast with the tenderness and universal appeal of the Christmas festival, the festival of Easter contains something infinitely sublime. If human souls are able to celebrate the Easter festival truly, they cannot fail to be aware of its transcendent majesty. It brings the sublime conception of the Divine Being who descended into a human body and passed through death. The whole riddle of death and the preservation in death itself of the eternal life of the soul—this is the great vista presented by the Easter festival.

These times of festival can be experienced in their depths only when we recall many things made real to us by Spiritual Science. Think only of how closely connected with all the festivals celebrated in the world in commemoration of the births of saviours are the thoughts arising from the Christmas festival. We are reminded, for example, of the Mithras festival celebrating the birth of Mithras in a cave. All these things are evidence of an intimate connection with nature. That Christmas is a festival linked with nature is symbolised in the Christmas Tree, and the birth, too, leads our minds to the workings and powers of nature. But because the birth of which Spiritual Science has so many things to say is that of Jesus of Nazareth, it is a birth fraught with infinite significance. And remembering that the Spirit of the earth wakens in winter, is most active during the season when outer nature appears to lie sleeping in a mantle of ice and snow, we can feel that the Christmas festival leads us into elemental nature herself, and that the lighting of the Christmas candles is a symbol of how the Spirit is awakening in the wintry darkness of nature.

If we would relate the Christmas festival to the life and being of man, we can do so by remembering that man is also connected with nature when he has separated from her spiritually, as he does in sleep, when in his ego and astral body he has gone into the spiritual world. His etheric body remains bound, supersensibly, to the physical body, and represents the part of man's being which belongs to elemental nature, to that elemental nature which wakens to life within the earth when the earth is shrouded in the ice of winter. It is far more than an analogy, indeed it is a profound truth to say that in addition to everything else, the Christmas festival is a token that man has in his being an etheric, elemental principle, an etheric body through which he is linked with elemental nature.

If you think, now, of all that has been said in the course of many years about the gradual darkening and decline of man's forces, you will realise how closely all the forces in the human astral body are connected with the death-bringing processes. The fact that we have to develop the astral body during our life, and that in the astral body we have to receive the spiritual, means that, in doing so, we bring the seeds of death into our being. It is quite incorrect to believe that death is connected with life in an external sense only, for the connection is most inward and fundamental. Our life is as it is only because we are able to die in the way we do. But this is bound up with the whole development of man's astral body. Again it is more than an analogy when we say: The Easter festival is a symbol for everything that has to do with the astral nature of man, with that principle of his being which, whenever he sleeps, leaves the physical body together with him and enters the spiritual world whence descended that Divine-Spiritual Being Who in Jesus of Nazareth actually passed through death. If one were speaking in an age more alive to the spiritual than is our own, what I have just said would be recognised as reality, whereas in our days it is taken merely as symbolism. It would then be realised that the purpose of instituting the Christmas and Easter festivals was to provide man with tokens of remembrance that he is connected with spiritual nature, with that nature that brings death to the physical, and to provide him with tokens reminding him that in his etheric body and astral body he is himself a bearer of the spiritual.—In our days these things have been forgotten. They will come to light again when humanity has the will to acquire understanding of spiritual truths such as these.

But now, besides the etheric body and the astral body, we bear within us as that which is supremely spiritual, our Ego. We know something of the complex nature of the Ego. We know especially that it is the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation, that the inner forces of the Ego build themselves up and shape themselves to that form which we carry forward into our being in each new incarnation. In the Ego we rise again from death to prepare for a new incarnation. It is by virtue of the Ego that we are individuals. If we can say that the etheric body represents in a certain sense that which is akin to birth and is connected with the elemental forces of nature, that the astral body symbolises the death-bringing principle that is connected with the higher spirituality, so we can say that the Ego represents our continual rising again in the spirit, our resurrection into the spiritual realm which is neither nature nor the world of stars, but pervades them all. And just as the Christmas festival can be connected with the etheric body and the Easter festival with the astral body, so the Whitsun festival can be connected with the Ego. This is the festival which, representing the immortality of the Ego, is a token of the fact that we, as men, do not share only in the universal life of nature, do not merely undergo death, but that we are individual immortal beings, rising ever and again from death.

And how beautifully this comes to expression when the Christmas thought, the Easter thought and the Whitsun thought are carried further! The Christmas festival is directly connected with earthly happenings, with the winter solstice, the time when the earth is shrouded in deepest darkness. In celebrating the Christmas festival we follow as it were the law by which earth-existence itself is governed; when the nights are longest and the days shortest, when the earth is frost-bound, we withdraw into ourselves and seek for the spiritual that is now alive within the earth. The Christmas festival is linked with the Spirit of the earth; it reminds us ever and again that we belong to the earth, that the Spirit had perforce to come down from cosmic heights and take earthly form in order to be a child of earth among the children of earth.

The Easter festival has a different setting. You know well that Easter is determined by the relation of the sun to the moon on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, the first full moon after the 21st March. The Easter festival, therefore, is fixed according to the relative position of the sun to the moon. In a wonderful way, then, the Christmas festival is linked with the earth, and the Easter festival with the cosmos. At Christmas we are reminded of what is most holy in the earth, at Easter of what is most holy in the heavens. But the thought underlying the Christian festival of Whitsun is associated in a most beautiful way with what is even above the stars—the universal, spiritual, cosmic fire which individualises and in the fiery tongues descends upon the Apostles. It is the fire that is neither heavenly alone nor earthly alone; it is the all-pervading fire which individualises and passes into each single human being. In very truth the Whitsun festival is linked with the whole universe. Just as the Christmas festival is connected with the earth and the Easter festival with the stars, so is the Whitsun festival directly connected with man, with individual man, inasmuch as he receives the spark of spiritual life out of the whole universe. What is bestowed upon mankind in general through the descent to the earth of the Being who was both God and Man, is made ready for every individual human being in the fiery tongues of Pentecost. These fiery tongues represent what lives alike in man, in the stars, in the world.

And so for those who are seeking for the spiritual, this festival of Whitsun has a meaning and content of special profundity, calling ever and again for perpetual renewal of the spiritual quest.

In our days it is necessary that these thoughts of the festival should be taken in a deeper sense than at other times. For how we shall emerge from the grievous events of this age will depend very largely upon how deeply men are able to experience these thoughts. That souls will have themselves to work their way out of the present catastrophic conditions is already beginning to be realised here and there. And those who have come to Spiritual Science should feel with even greater intensity the need of the age for new strength to be infused into the spiritual life, the need to surmount materialism. This victory over materialism will only be possible if men have the will to kindle the spiritual world into living activity within them, to celebrate the Whitsun festival inwardly and with true earnestness.

• 1. Berlin, 1916.

(For a different translation of this lecture, see: The Proclamations to the Magi and the Shepherds)

Let us begin to-day by considering certain questions connected with this time of festival, with this season which yearly renews the memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, renews also a direct experience of it in our feeling.

We really have three such times of festival in Christian tradition: the Christmas, the Easter and the Whitsuntide festivals. And we may say that, each in a different way, these three festivals bring man into connection, into relationship, with that in which the Christian tradition sees the meaning of all earth-evolution. These three festivals also differ as regards the human soul-forces. Christmas appeals more to the feeling and in a certain sense is the most popular festival, because to understand it requires a deepening of the feeling-life, and because it is the most readily approachable for the large masses of humanity. The Easter festival, which requires that we raise ourselves to an understanding of the real Mystery of Golgotha, of the entrance of a super-sensible Being into human evolution, is the most challenging to the human powers of understanding. It is a festival which lifts human understanding to the highest level, and which, although it is also generally celebrated, cannot however be popular in the same sense as the Christmas festival.

The third, the Whitsun festival, establishes a relationship particularly between the human will and the super-sensible world, the world to which the Christ-Being as such belongs. The carrying over of will-impulses into execution in the world is brought to human consciousness through a right understanding of the Whitsun festival.

Thus what we may call the secret of Christianity is given form in these yearly celebrations. The way in which the Christmas mystery touches man can be brought before our consciousness in the most manifold ways; and with the recurrence of the Christmas festival during the course of the years, we have considered the Christmas-Thought from the most varied standpoints. This time let us call to mind something which can become clear to any one who considers the Christmas mystery in the light of the Gospels.

In the Gospels we find a twofold announcement of the birth of Christ Jesus. One annunciation is made to the poor shepherds out in the fields. An Angel announces the birth of Christ Jesus to them—in a dream, or however one may wish to call it. Here we have to do with the perception of this event through inner soul-forces, soul-forces which, in the case of these shepherds in the vicinity where Christ Jesus was born, were in a special condition. And a second annunciation is set forth in the Gospels, the annunciation to the Three Kings, the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are told that they followed a star which announced to them the advent of Christ Jesus on the earth.

Thus we are shown two ways by which this earlier humanity reached what we may call its higher knowledge. This is another example of something which is never properly grasped in the present age. To-day we usually conceive of human beings as possessing thought and perception, and we imagine this thinking and perceiving, in fact, all use of the inner soul-forces, to have been in all past centuries and millenia essentially the same—only more primitive—as it is to-day. We know from anthroposophical spiritual science how the soul-constitution of man has changed with the passage of time; how differently in ancient times—for instance, seven or eight thousand years after the beginning of the post-Atlantean period, or even earlier—humanity regarded its own life and the nature of the surrounding universe. Moreover we know how this soul-constitution underwent many changes before it became that reasoning analytical faculty existing to-day, which in its approach to the outer world knows only the purely sense-perceptible aspect of things. This evolution takes its starting-point from a certain ancient instinctive clairvoyance and proceeds through the state found in our modern soul-condition, to return again in future to a clairvoyant perception of the world which will be permeated by full human consciousness.

At the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on earth the ancient instinctive clairvoyance was already greatly dimmed. Men's souls were indeed differently constituted than they are to-day, although they no longer had the old clairvoyance; gone also were their old wise ways of fathoming the universe. The ancient wisdom-teachings as well as the old instinctive clairvoyance had grown very dim as the Mystery of Golgotha approached humanity. But remnants of both still existed, and we are clearly shown in the Gospels, if we rightly understand them, that this was the case. Such remnants were still present among single favoured individuals. We may recognise as such the poor shepherds out in the fields, who in the piety of their hearts possessed a certain clairvoyant capacity of a dreamlike nature. And we also recognise as such the Three Magi from the East, who are pictured as standing on the topmost rung of human society, and had retained from ancient times a capacity gained from a certain stream of wisdom, giving them insight into the course of world-events. Thus, on the one hand, the poor shepherds could be approached in a kind of dream-experience, in inward perception, by the event of Christ Jesus' birth, while, on the other, the Three Magi from the East developed a science which enabled them, by the study of world-phenomena, the appearances in the heavens, to be aware of significant events taking place open the earth quite beyond ordinary human ken.

Thus there are pointed out to us two quite definite, but widely differing, modes of knowledge. Let us turn our attention for the moment to what was present as the last remnant of an ancient stream of wisdom in the Three Wisemen from the Orient. We are shown clearly that these Wisemen were able to read the riddles in the movements of the stars. In the existing descriptions we are made aware of an ancient knowledge of the stars whereby access was gained to the mysteries of the starry worlds and wherein the secrets of human events were also revealed. This ancient knowledge of the stars was something quite different from that of to-day. Our astronomy is in a certain sense also prophetic; it can prophesy eclipses of the sun and moon and so on, but it is merely mathematical and mechanical. It only speaks of space and time-relationships in so far as these may be represented mathematically, whereas the ancient wisdom of, the stars perceived in these movements something of higher significance, remote from space and time, taking place in the inner life of man. If we examine the science of humanity in olden times, we find its content essentially one of this wisdom of the stars. Men sought in the stars for a deeper understanding of earthly happenings. For to them the starry world was not the abstract mechanical thing it has become for modern humanity. For them the starry world was something full of life. They felt the presence of an essential Being in the universe, in the case of every planet. By means of an inner soul-language, in a certain sense, they even spoke with the individual planets, as we to-day speak merely from man to man in external words. People were conscious of inward soul-experience which was a reflection of what was going on out in universal space in the movement of the stars. This was a living, spiritualized way of looking at the universe. And man felt himself connected as a soul and spirit with this universe. This wisdom of the world was fostered in schools, in what may be described as Mystery schools, where the pupils were prepared in a careful, intimate and inner way to gain an understanding of the movements of the stars such as might illuminate human life upon the earth.

Of what nature were these preparations? These preparations for a knowledge of the starry heavens and their influences were of such a character that, even then, in the age of instinctive clairvoyance, the pupil was led to develop a more wide-awake life than normally. The large mass of mankind had a kind of instinctive clairvoyance, corresponding to a state of soul which was less wide awake than the one normal for us to-day. In ancient periods of human evolution people were not able to think as clearly as we can now. Geometry and mathematics as we know them could not then exist. The whole of life between birth and death had more of a dreaming character; but just because it was dreamlike it had a far more lively way of perceiving the surrounding universe than does our waking life to-day. And the strange thing was that the pupils of those ancient Mysteries existing 2000 years, or even 1000 years, before the Mystery of Golgotha (such men as the Magi may be counted among the last remaining disciples of this training), were trained in a knowledge which was very similar to our geometry and mathematics. Euclid was the first to give geometry to humanity; but he merely communicated it to humanity in general. What Euclid gave in the way of geometry had already lived in the Mysteries for thousands of years as something communicated only to the most carefully selected Mystery-pupils. It had a different effect then than in later times. It may seem strange and paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that what our children learn as arithmetic and geometry was taught in the Mystery-schools to selected individuals who were considered specially endowed and so accepted in the Mysteries.

To-day we often hear reference made to the mysterious matters supposedly taught in the Mysteries. Actually, in their purely abstract content, these mysterious matters are none other than those taught to children to-day. They are nothing else; and their Mystery-character lies not in the fact of their being unknown to us, but in the different way in which at that time they were taught. It is quite a different matter to call upon the reasoning of children through the content of geometry in an age in which, from the moment of awaking until falling asleep again man lives in a wide-awake consciousness, than it was to present these matters to specially selected human beings, whose consciousness was more mature, during the age of ancient instinctive clairvoyance and dreaming consciousness.

Our modern conceptions of these things are by no means always accurate. For example, there is a poem to Varuna in Oriental literature describing Varuna as appearing in the air, as wafting like the wind through the woods; Varuna appears in the lightning flashing out of the dripping clouds; in the human heart when the will is roused to action; in the heavens when the sun moves across them. Varuna is to be found on the mountains in the juice of the Soma.

What the juice of the Soma is, modern books profess not to know. To-day in our great learning we agree that we do not know what the juice of the Soma is, although there are people who drink it by the quart, and certainly know it very well from a certain standpoint. But it is a different matter to know these things—from the standpoint of the Mysteries than from the standpoint of waking consciousness in profane feeling.

You can read to-day of the Philosopher's Stone, which was accounted precious in an age when the nature of substance was somewhat differently regarded than it is to-day. Again the historians of alchemy will tell you that the Philosopher's Stone is quite unknown. Here and there in my lectures I have indicated that the Philosopher's Stone is quite familiar to most human beings; they simply do not know its qualities, or why it is so named. But since it is used by the ton, it is very familiar to most human beings.

The facts are simply upon occasion quite different from the concepts we hold of them with our present-day abstract, theoretical grasp of things, so remote from life and reality. There is not even a true grasp of what it might mean to take in the sciences of arithmetic and geometry with quite another soul-constitution than we have to-day, with a mature soul-condition. I have referred to this particular type of Mystery-schooling in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”; but just such important things as these are usually not properly understood, they are not ordinarily understood in their real significance. The fact that the way in which people were approached with things constituted the very kernel of the Mysteries in ancient times is something which should be grasped. And it was thus also in the case of such purely mathematical considerations, the content of feeling and the human fullness of which Novalis still sensed when he felt mathematics to be like great poetry—something which most people now-a-days will not agree with. And it is to such grasping of the world, permeated as it was with feeling, but poured into mathematical mould, that the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was led. And when the pupil of the ancient Mysteries was thus brought to a mathematical understanding of the universe, he developed just such a world-outlook as that possessed by the Wisemen from the East, as they are described to us.

The mathematics of the universe, which have become so thoroughly abstract to us, revealed at that time something really living, because the revelation found completion in what was brought to understand it. Thus what sprang as science from an ancient culture, and was still preserved in its last fragments to the Magi, made possible the one annunciation, through the channel of the teachers of wisdom, through external science, the annunciation experienced by the Magi.

On the other hand, it was possible for the inner experience of the secrets of humanity to develop in human beings who, like the shepherds in the fields, had a special predisposition in this direction. In such cases the inner forces of man had to reach certain heights; then what took place in the world of men became direct imaginative perception, an instinctive, imaginative picture-perception. Thus, through inner vision, the poor shepherds in the fields partook in the annunciation: “God makes revelation of His Being in the heavenly heights, and His peace shall be with all men of good will.” Thus did the secrets of the universe speak to the innermost being of the poor shepherds in the fields, as well as to the utmost heights attainable to human wisdom at that time, to the Wisemen of the East. Thus the great mystery of earthly life was imparted from two different sides.

What did these Wisemen of the East experience? What was the special development brought about in the souls of these pupils through the introduction of mathematics into their soul-condition, when this was found especially mature and ready? Kant speaks of mathematics as being “a priori” truth. With “a priori” he means a truth which is present within us before our external, empirical knowledge, before our experience of it existed. This is mere word-wisdom; nothing at all is said with this “a priori”! A meaning attaches to it only when it can be shown by spiritual science that mathematics is something that rises up within us, that rises to consciousness out of man's inner being.

Whence does it come? It proceeds from the experiences we went through in the spiritual world before birth, or conception. There we lived in the great wide universe. There we experienced what could be experienced before we had bodily eyes and ears. There we had “a priori” experience, when considered in relation to our life on earth. These “a priori” experiences rise in an unconscious way out of our inner being into the sphere of consciousness. Unless modern man has a premonition of this, as had Novalis, he does not know that when he does mathematics, experiences of the time before conception and birth are rising up within him. But for a person with true insight into these matter the mathematical capacity is in itself a proof of man's life in the spiritual world before conception. As far as those are concerned for whom this is not a proof of pre-natal existence, the fact remains that they do not think thoroughly enough about life's phenomena and have no idea what the true origin of mathematics is.

The pupils of the ancient Mysteries who possessed that wise outlook, still extant in its last fragments in the Wisemen of the East, had the clear impression: “When we study the stars and apply our mathematical forms and reckoning to them, we are spreading out again over the outer reaches of universal space what we actually lived in before our birth.” And it seemed to such a pupil of the ancient Mysteries as though he must say: “Now I am living on earth; my eyes look out into universal space and see my spatial surroundings. In these same phenomena of the spatial universe I lived before my birth; there I myself counted from star to star what I now merely copy and symbolize in mathematics. With my innermost forces I moved from star to star, living in what I now merely draw.”

Thus they experienced again all they had gone through before birth, or conception, and consequently it was holy to them. They realized that they had lived in a spiritual world before they walked on earth. This knowledge of the world in which man lives before he descends to the earth was present in its last remnants in the Wisemen of the East, and by its means they knew of the advent of the Christ-Being.

Whence came this Christ-Being? He came out of that time which we live through between death and rebirth, and He united Himself with the life we live through between birth and death. For this reason the science that concerns itself with the world we live in between death and rebirth can unveil such a mystery as the Mystery of Golgotha. And out of this science announcement was made to the Magi of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christmas Mystery.

As man lives here on the earth and concerns himself with gaining knowledge of his surroundings, with developing impulses for his actions, for his social life, he has still another unconscious experience. He knows nothing of it; but just as he experiences the after-effects of his pre-natal life, so does he also experience what passes through the gates of death and becomes the content of life after death, namely, the forces already present like a seed between birth and death, which only come to their full blossoming in the life after death. These forces worked with great intensity in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And they worked in their last remnants in the poor shepherds in the fields because of their special piety. Moreover, it is in these forces especially that we live between falling asleep and awaking, when our souls are outside of our bodies in outer space. The soul then lives as it will live consciously in future when it has laid aside the physical body after death. These forces, which under special conditions can penetrate from the world of sleep and dream into waking life, were once very active in the ancient instinctive clairvoyance. And these the poor shepherds experienced, receiving through them a revelation of the Mystery of Golgotha from a different quarter than that from which the annunciation came to the three Magi.

What does one experience by means of the forces peculiar to man between death and rebirth when, as in the case of the Wisemen from the Orient, they are kindled in the life between birth and death? One experiences what takes place beyond what is earthly. One is borne away from the earth out into the world of the stars where we live between death and rebirth. This was the world into which the Wisemen of the East were led away from the earth out into cosmic space.

And what does one experience by means of the forces which rise up from the inner being of man, especially in the world of dreams? One experiences what goes on within the earth. Here the Tellurian forces, the forces of which we partake because we live in our bodies, are at work. These forces work particularly in what we live through between falling asleep and awaking. Here, too, we are in the outer world, but essentially in that outer world belonging to the earth.

You will say that this is a contradiction of the truth that we are outside of our bodies. But it is not a contradiction. We always perceive only what is external to ourselves; that wherein we live is never perceived. Only people who are especially ignorant about certain subjects, and who are bent on establishing a knowledge consisting solely of phrases, are capable of skipping lightly over such matters with their phrases and of saying, for example, that the point is not to found a science of the spirit upon knowledge gained outside man, but to add to natural science a science derived from man's inner being.

With such a torrent of phrases Darmstadt wisdom-schools may indeed be founded, but one may still remain a mere phrase-maker even when founding schools of wisdom. For rightly understood, the matter is as follows. We may indeed say that, to arrive at the super-sensible, the world must be described from within; but we must first get into the inner being and then look at what is external from outside the body, by looking back upon the body. Keyserling's talks concerning observation from the standpoint of the soul do not attempt to enter man's inner being, they merely use phrases.

The fact really is such that when we are in the condition experienced between falling asleep and awaking, we look back, we feel our way back, as it were, into our bodies. We feel what is of the earth in our bodies; for they are of the earth. The poor shepherds in the fields really, felt the revelation of the earth through their bodies when in a dreamlike condition, they perceived what was happening in the form of the perception of an angel's voice.

These are the two absolute contrasts: the Magi with their knowledge of the heavens, and the shepherds with their earth-revelation. And it corresponds completely to the Mystery of Golgotha that the revelation came from two such different quarters. For a heavenly Being, as yet untouched by earth, was descending to it, and this descent had to make itself known by means of the wisdom of the heavens, which knew that something heavenly was descending.

In the shepherds' wisdom we learn to know the earth by feeling our way into its weaving life as it perceived the descent of the heavenly Being. It is the same annunciation, only from another side. Wonderfully unified, we thus see what, although it was one and the same event, was announced in a twofold way to men.

And when we see how humanity received the event of Golgotha, we must say that, in regard to this and other matters, there were only the merest remnants of the ancient wisdom left to man. I have already shown how the Mystery of Golgotha was grasped in the first centuries of Christianity with the help of the fragments of an ancient wisdom known as Gnosis. From then on it became more and more a matter of trying to penetrate into the nature of the event of Golgotha with analytical reasoning powers alone. And in the 19th century naturalism gradually made its appearance in the confessional sphere. The super-sensible content of the event of Golgotha was no longer grasped at all, Christ became merely the “wise man of Nazareth”, naturalistically conceived. A new, spiritual grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha became necessary. The fact of the Mystery of Golgotha must not be confused with the way in which human understanding has dealt with this fact.

Now a soul-constitution such as the shepherds in the fields and the Wisemen of the East possessed still existed in its last fragmentary form at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha occurred. But all this changed in the course of human evolution. Everything changes and undergoes metamorphosis. What then became of the wisdom of the Eastern Magi? It has become our mathematics, with its knowledge of the heavens! The Magi possessed a super-earthly science based on sublime recollections of pre-natal life. All this has been shrunken and cramped into our mathematical, mechanical grasp of the heavens, so that we apply nothing but the laws of mathematics and mechanics to their phenomena. What we have in the way of mathematical astronomy is all that still rises up out of our inner being as the modern metamorphosis of what the Magi once possessed.

And looking at our external sense-knowledge, which is merely a perceiving with eyes and ears, we find it to be the externalized inner knowledge of the shepherds in the fields. What could once convey to the shepherds in the fields the inner secrets of earthly existence now permits only of that cold, natural-scientific observation of the outer world which is the offspring of the shepherds' wisdom. The child bears but slight resemblance to its mother. And our mathematics, our astronomy, are the offspring of the wisdom of the Magi.

Humanity had to go through this development. Our scientific researchers, sitting in their laboratories and clinics, have very little in common with the shepherds but theirs is a direct metamorphosis of the shepherds' wisdom. And our mathematicians likewise are in direct line of descent from the Eastern Wisemen. The outer has become the inner, and the inner, outer. And so we have indeed grown remote from the Mystery of Golgotha. We must become aware of this fact. We have become far removed indeed from such understanding. Perhaps many of those who call themselves preachers and ministers of Christianity in the official sense are the most remote from it of all.

The forces of knowledge, faith and feeling that live in man to-day can never penetrate through to the true being of the Mystery of Golgotha. It must be found entirely anew.

The wisdom of the Magi too has become dry mathematics, perceiving the heavens only in designs. It has become an inner thing. But inwardness must take on life once more. What was once outer must be built up again from within.

And now let us try to understand the content of a book such as my Occult Science from this standpoint. The Magi had a real penetration into the starry heavens; they saw what was spiritual there because they had insight into human pre-natal experience. This has become abstract in our mathematics. But the very same forces out of which we develop mathematics can be brought back to life, and intensified as imaginative vision. Then there is born from out our inner being a world which, although we create it within us, we see as the outer world, as though: containing Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. We see the heavens in inner vision just as the Eastern Wisemen externally perceived the secrets of the Mystery of Golgotha. The external has become an inner thing, has become mathematical abstraction; and in like manner the inner must be widened out until it becomes a universe around us, until inner vision leads us to a new astronomy experienced within.

Only by thus reaching out for a new understanding of the Christ can we fill the festival of Christmas with a certain meaning. Has the Christmas festival any meaning for most human beings nowadays? It is a very beautiful custom, scarcely 150 years old, to have the Christmas Tree as a symbol of the Christmas festival. The custom of having a Christmas Tree came into being only in the 19th century. What is this Christmas Tree really? It is not so easy to find its meaning. In making the effort to find it, and by discovering how the Christmas Tree gradually came into use, how it grew from being the little branch, carried on St. Nicholas' arm on the 6th of December, into being our Christmas Tree, we come to realize that this Christmas Tree is also directly connected with the Tree of Paradise.

Human consciousness thus looks back here to the Tree of Paradise, to Adam and Eve. What does this signify? This is one aspect of the way we make the Mystery of Golgotha known to-day. We turn back from the Mystery of Golgotha to the creation of the world, to the beginning of the world. We fail to grasp the meaning of the world's redemption, and instead turn back to the God who created the universe. This is expressed in the gradual disappearance of the real Christmas symbol, of the manger—so sublime a part of the Christmas plays of earlier centuries—and in the appearance of the Christmas Tree which is really the Tree of Paradise.

Thus the old Jehovah-religion again took the place of the Christ-religion; the Christmas Tree is the symbol of the reappearance of the religion of Jehovah. This Jehovah-religion makes its appearance in many shapes and forms to-day. For Jahve was once rightly worshipped as the one and only God in an age when his people felt themselves to be a unified folk, content within their limits, and living in the expectation of some day filling the entire earth. In our age people talk of Christ Jesus, but really worship only Jehovah. For, as we saw during the war, the people of the various nations talked of Christ, but were really concerned with the original God, Jehovah, who lives in the forces of nature and heredity.

On the one hand, the Christmas Tree, on the other, the national gods so remote from Christianity—with these humanity has turned back from grasping the Mystery of Golgotha to lay hold again on something belonging to a much earlier period. There has been a retrogression into the ancient Jehovah religion in the adherence to the nationalistic principle, in the announcement that the various peoples would follow their national gods.

You see, what must be taken into consideration is that in the annunciation, to the shepherds, and in the annunciation that came to the Magi, there is a human element common to all men. For the earth is the common property of all. The earth-annunciation received by the shepherds was one which could make no national distinctions and differentiations. And the Magi, who received a sun-annunciation, an annunciation from the heavens, also received a purely human element. For after the sun shines upon the lands of one folk, it shines on the lands of others also. Heaven and earth belong to all in common. With Christianity, a common human element is roused in all humanity.

This fact is pointed to in the twofold annunciation of the Christmas story. Such matters which were fully understood when man's soul-constitution was an entirely different one, will only be comprehensible to-day with the help of spiritual science.

We should inscribe this into our hearts to-day when we think of the Christmas festival. To-day, in thinking of the Christmas Mystery, we have need to look for a birth. We should not merely busy ourselves with idle talk about the Christmas festival and our own feelings, but should look for what must be born anew in this our age. For truly, real Christianity must be born anew. We need a cosmic Christmas festival for humanity.

Reflections such as those we are considering this evening are meant to be an interlude in the otherwise continuous presentation of the humanities. In particular, I would like to try this evening to develop some of the ideas I touched on in my lecture last December on the intellectual and cultural situation in Austria. In our time, in which the concept of Central Europe, and also of Central European intellectual life, must increasingly develop as a result of difficult events and experiences, it seems justified to take a look at the lesser-known circumstances of Austrian intellectual life.

Hermann Bahr, who is known in the broadest circles as a witty man, as a man who cultivates the most diverse areas of literature, comes, I would say, from a typically Austrian region: from Upper Austria, and visited France, Spain and Russia at a relatively young age, and I know that at the time he was of the opinion that he could faithfully represent the essence of French and even Spanish and Russian intellectual culture to a certain extent. He even immersed himself so completely in Spanish politics that, as he assured us at the time, he wrote a fiery article in Spain against the Sultan of Morocco when he returned. Well, for decades now, after his world travels, he has been staying in Austria, working as a playwright, as an editor, as a general observer of art, and also as a biographer, for example of the much-misunderstood Max Burckhardt, and so on. Until recently, I tried to keep track of what Hermann Bahr was writing. In recent times, and actually for quite a while, one finds in his work an endeavor, which he often expressed himself, that he is searching, to discover Austria. Now imagine, the man who thought he knew French, even Spanish character, who wrote a book about Russian character, then goes back to his homeland, is such a member of his homeland that he only needs to speak five words and you immediately recognize the Austrian; the man seeks Austria! This may seem strange. But it is not so at all. This search originates from the quite justified feeling that, after all, for the Austrian, Austria, Austrian nature – I would say – Austrian national substance is not easy to find. I would like to describe some of this Austrian national character in a few typical personalities, insofar as it is expressed in Austrian intellectual life.

When I was young, many people were of the opinion, the then justified opinion, that when considering art, artistry, literature, and intellectual development, one looked too much to the past. In particular, much blame was attached to the scientific history of art and literature, for which a personality is only considered if they lived not just decades but centuries ago. At that time, considerations could hardly rise to the immediate perception of the present. I believe that today one could feel something opposite: in the way that considerations about art and artists are so commonplace, we now often experience that everyone more or less starts with themselves or with their immediate contemporaries. I do not wish to consider the present situation of Austrian intellectual life here, but rather a period of time that is not so far in the past. I do not wish to proceed in a descriptive manner. With descriptions, one is always right and always wrong at the same time. One touches on one or the other shade of this or that fact or personality, and both the person who agrees and the person who refutes will undoubtedly be right in the case of a general characteristic, in the case of general descriptions. I should like to give a symptomatic description. I should like to pick out individual personalities and in these personalities to show some of the many things that are alive in the Austrian intellectual world. You will excuse me if I start with a personality who is close to me. I believe, however, that in this case being close to someone does not prevent me from making an objective assessment of the personality in question. But on the other hand, I believe that in this person I have encountered a personality in life that is extraordinarily characteristic of Austrian intellectual life.

When I came to the Vienna Technical University in 1879, the subject, which was of course taught there as a minor subject, was the history of German literature, Karl Julius Schröer. He is little known and much misunderstood by those who have met him. I now believe that he is one of those personalities who deserve to live on in the intellectual history of Austria. However, an important literary historian once made some strange comments about Karl Julius Schröer in the presence of a party at which I was sitting next to him. There was talk of a German princess, and the literary historian in question wanted to say that this German princess, however talented she might otherwise be, sometimes, as he put it, “could be very wrong” in her literary judgments; and as an example, he cited the fact that she considers Karl Julius Schröer to be an important man. Schröer took up a position as a teacher of German literary history at a Protestant lyceum in Pressburg around the middle of the last century, at a momentous point in Austrian intellectual life. He later taught the same subject at the University of Budapest. Karl Julius Schröer was the son of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, who was mentioned in my previous lecture on Austrian identity. Tobias Gottfried Schröer was also an extraordinarily important figure for Austria. He had founded the Pressburg Lyceum and wanted to make it a center for the cultivation of German intellectual life. His aim was to help those Germans in Austria who were surrounded by other nationalities to become fully aware of their identity as part of the German intellectual world.

Tobias Gottfried Schröer is a personality who, from a historical-spiritual point of view, comes across in such a way that one would like to feel a certain emotion, because one always has the feeling: how is it possible in the world that an important mind can remain completely unknown due to the unfavorable conditions of the time, completely unknown in the sense that one calls “being known” that one knows that this or that personality has existed and has achieved this or that. However, the achievements of Tobias Gottfried Schröer are by no means unknown or unappreciated. I just want to emphasize that as early as 1830 Tobias Gottfried Schröer wrote a very interesting drama, “The Bear”, which has at its center the personality of Tsar Ivan IV, and that Karl von Holtei said of this drama that if the characters depicted were Schröer's creations, then he had achieved something extraordinarily significant. And they were Schröer's inventions except for Ivan IV. However, the level-headed man, the not at all somehow radically minded Tobias Gottfried Schröer, had a flaw. In those days, people could not be allowed to read what he wrote, so to speak, that is, this view was held by the censors. And so it came about that he had to have all his works printed abroad and that one could not get to know him as the important dramatic poet that he was. He wrote a drama in 1839 called “The Life and Deeds of Emmerich Tököly and His Fellow Rebels”. In this work, one encounters in a large historical painting all the intellectual currents that existed in Hungary at that time. And in the character of Tököly himself, one encounters what critics of the time rightly called a Hungarian Götz von Berlichingen, not so much because Tököly had to be called a Götz von Berlichingen, but because Schröer managed to depict Tököly in such a vivid way that the dramatic figure of Tököly could only be compared to Götz von Berlichingen. It was only by a strange mistake that Tobias Gottfried Schröer was sometimes recognized. For example, he wrote a paper “On Education and Teaching in Hungary”. This paper was regarded by many as something extraordinary. But it was also banned, and attention was drawn to the fact that this author - who was basically the calmest man in the world - was actually a dangerous person. But the Palatine of Hungary, Archduke Joseph, read this writing. Now the storm that had risen over this writing subsided. He inquired about the author. They did not know who he was. But they speculated that it was the rector of a Hungarian school. And Archduke Joseph, the Palatine of Hungary, immediately took the man - it was not the right one! - into the house to educate his son. What a tribute to a personality! Such things have happened many times, especially with regard to this personality. For this personality is the same one who, under the name Christian Oeser, has written all kinds of works that have been widely distributed: an “Aesthetics for virgins,” a “World history for girls' schools.” If you read this “World History for Girls' Schools” by a Protestant author, you will certainly find it quite remarkable, and yet it is true that it was once even introduced in a convent as the corresponding world history – truly, in a convent! The reason for this was that there is a picture of St. Elizabeth on the title page. I leave it to you to believe that the liberalness of the nuns might have contributed to the introduction of this “world history for girls' schools” in a convent.

After pronouncing such sentences, Karl Julius Schröer let his gaze wander over the times when the German essence was thoroughly misunderstood by other nations around it as a result of various events. He spoke about this as follows: “The German name was held in low esteem by the nations that owed it so much; at that time, the German was valued in France almost on a par with barbarians.” In 1846, he spoke to his audience at the German Lyceum in Pressburg! But in contrast to this, Karl Julius Schröer was full of enthusiasm for what one could say he saw as the German intellectual substance, not for what is merely called nationality in the ethnographic sense, but for the spiritual that permeates everything that holds the German essence together. I quote a few of Karl Julius Schröer's statements from this time, which now lies far behind us, for the reason of showing how peculiarly that which is called the confession of German nationality lives in the more outstanding minds. Basically, we have to keep in mind that the way the German stands by his nationality cannot be understood by the other nationalities of Europe, because it is fundamentally different from the way the other nationalities stand by what they call their nationality. If we look at the more outstanding and deeply feeling Germans, we find that they are German in the best sense of the word because they see Germanness in what is spiritually pulsating, but also as a force tinged with this spirituality, in what counts itself German; that Germanness is something like an ideal for them, something to which they look up, that they do not see merely as a national organism. And therein lie many of the difficulties why German character – even in our days, and especially in our days – is so misunderstood, so hated. Such Germans as Karl Julius Schröer want to achieve their Germanness through knowledge, by gaining insight into the possibilities of life and action that the living organism of a nation offers. And again and again Karl Julius Schröer's gaze wanders, not in arrogance, but in modesty, to the question: What world-historical mission in the development of the human race has that which, in this best sense of the word, can be called Germanness and German nature? And before world history it wants to be justified, what is built up in views on German nature. Much more could be said about the special position of such minds in relation to the German character. Thus Karl Julius Schröer, speaking from this attitude, says: “The world epoch that begins with Christianity is also called the Germanic world; for although the other nations also have a great share in history, almost all the states of Europe were founded by Germanic peoples... .” — this is a truth that, at least today, is not readily acknowledged outside of the German border posts. Of course, it is not heard, but it is not readily acknowledged. “... Spain, France, England, Germany, Austria, even Russia, Greece, Sweden and so on, were founded by Germans and imbued with the German spirit.”

And then Karl Julius Schröer cites for his listeners a saying of a German literary historian, Wackernagel: “Throughout Europe now flowed...” - namely after the migration of peoples - “A pure Germanic blood, or combining Roman-Celtic blood, now flowed a Germanic spirit of life, took the Christian faith... on its purer, stronger floods and carried it along.” There was no time in which the hatred of Europe would have prompted such views as today. They were views that arose in a thoroughly honest way from the contemplation of the German character by this mind. And so he expressed himself: “The civilized peoples of Europe are one great family, and it is a single great course of the nations of Europe that leads through all errors back to the source of truth and true art, on which all nations accompany the Germans, often overtaking them, but in the end one after the other falling behind them. The Romance peoples are usually the first in everything: the Italians, then the Spaniards, the French, then come the English and the Germans. One of these nations usually represents the culmination of a particular trend of the times. But lately, even the English have had their hour struck in art and science... “—said in 1846, though with reference to the development of intellectual life—”... and the time has come when German literature is visibly beginning to rule over Europe, as the Italian and French did before!"

Thus was the man rooted in his Austrian homeland. And since I later became very close to him, I know well that it meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing that could somehow be described in words: he would have wanted the domination of one nation over another—not even within Austria. If one wants to call an attitude like Karl Julius Schröer's national, then it is compatible with the acceptance of every nationality, insofar as this nationality wants to assert itself alongside others from the germ, from the source of its own being, and does not want to dominate these others. His concern was not to cultivate the supremacy of the German character over any other nationality or over any legitimate national aspiration, but to bring to full development within the German character what is inherent within that German character. And that is what is special about this man: that he felt himself intertwined with Austrian national character through his entire aesthetic sensibility, through his entire feeling, artistic feeling, popular feeling, but also through his scientific endeavors. He became, so to speak, an observer of this Austrian national character.

And so we see that as early as the 1950s, out of his deep love for the people, he collected those wonderful German Christmas plays that have been preserved among the German population of Hungary, and published “German Christmas Plays from Hungary”, those Christmas plays that are performed in the villages at Christmas time, at the time of the Epiphany. They are strange games! They were actually only printed for the first time in the mid-nineteenth century – and Schröer was one of the first to have such things printed. They have been preserved from generation to generation in the rural population. Since then, many such Christmas games have been collected in the most diverse areas, and much has been written about them. With such heartfelt love, with such intimate connection to folklore, as Kar! Julius Schröer wrote his introduction to the “German Christmas Plays from Hungary” at the time, hardly anything has been written in this field since. He shows us that manuscripts of the plays were always preserved from generation to generation, as they were a sacred ritual that people prepared for in the individual villages when Christmas season approached; and that those who were chosen to play, that is, to go around the village and the most diverse locales to play these games for the people, in which the creation of the world, the biblical history of the New Testament, the appearance of the three kings, and the like were depicted. Schröer describes how those who prepared for such plays not only prepared themselves for weeks by learning things by heart, by being drilled by some kind of director, but how they prepared themselves by following certain rules; how they did not drink wine for weeks, how they avoided other pleasures of life for weeks in order to have the right feelings, so to speak, to be allowed to perform in such plays. How Germanic character has absorbed Christianity can be seen, how this Christianity has flowed into these strange plays, which are sometimes crude, but always deeply moving and extraordinarily vivid. Later, as I said, others also collected these things; but none approached it with such devotion of his personality, with such a connection to what was being lived out, as Karl Julius Schröer, even if his representations, scientifically speaking, are long outdated.

Then he turned to the study of German folklore as it is spread throughout the vast territory of Austria-Hungary, of German folklore as it lives in the people. And there are numerous treatises by Karl Julius Schröer in which he presents this folklore in terms of its language and the intellectual life expressed through it. We have a dictionary, a description of the dialects of the Hungarian highlands, the area that was settled by German settlers on the southern slopes of the Carpathians, and still is today, although most of the area is Magyar. With tremendous love, through Karl Julius Schröer, I would say, every word was recorded that resonates with the dialect of this area; but we have always recorded it in such a way that one can see from his descriptions how his interest was directed towards seeking out what the cultural task was, what the particular way of life of the people who, coming from afar, had to push their way into the east at a certain time in order to temporarily cultivate their own culture in the midst of other peoples, later to remember it and then gradually to be absorbed into other cultures. What Schröer has achieved in this field will in many ways represent something for the future, like wonderful memories of the ferment that shaped German identity in the wide expanse of Austria.

Karl Julius Schröer later came to Vienna. He became director of the Protestant schools and later professor of German literary history at the Vienna Technical University. And I myself experienced how he knew how to influence those who were receptive to the presentation of directly felt intellectual life. Then he turned more and more to Goethe, delivered his “Faust” commentary, which appeared in several editions, and in 1875 wrote a history of German poetry that was met with much hostility. It became an example at the time after it was published, a “literary history from the wrist” called. However, Schröer's literary history is not a literary history written according to the methods that later became common in the Scherer school. But it is a literary history in which there is nothing but what the author experienced, experienced in the poetic works, in art, in the development of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century up to his time; because that is what he wanted to present at the time. Karl Julius Schröer's entire life and intellectual development can only be understood by considering the Austrian character of Schröer's entire personality, which brought the scientific and artistic into direct connection , and to experience it in direct connection with folklore, that folklore which, particularly in Austria, I would say, presents a problem at every point of its development, if one only knows how to experience and observe it. And one must often think, perhaps also abroad: Is this Austria a necessity? How does this Austria actually fit into the overall development of European culture?

Well, if you look at Austria in this way, it appears to be a great diversity. Many, many nations and ethnic groups live side by side, pushed together, and the life of the individual is often complicated by these underlying factors, even as a soul life and as a whole personality life. The things that now play from one nation into another, what comes to light through this lack of understanding and the desire to understand and the difficulties of life, it comes to one's attention at every turn in Austria, combined with other historical conditions of Austrian life. There is a poet who, with great but, I would say, modest genius, understood how to depict something of this Austrian essence. At the end of the 1880s and in the 1890s, he could occasionally be seen performing in Vienna when one came to the famous Café Griensteidl in Vienna and also in certain other literary circles. Yes, this Café Griensteidl basically belongs to Austrian literature; so much so that a writer, Karl Kraus, wrote a series of articles entitled “Demolished Literature” when it was demolished. Today, one still reads about Café Griensteidl as if it were a beautiful memory. Please excuse me for including this, but it is too interesting, because at Café Griensteidl, if you went there at certain times of the day, you could really see a cross-section of Austrian literature. But today, when you read about these things, you often read about the times of the waiter Heinrich, who later became famous, the famous Heinrich of Griensteidl, who knew what newspapers each person needed to have when they came in the door. But that was no longer the real time, the time of the somewhat jovial Heinrich, but the real time was that of Franz vom Griensteidl, who had lived through the days when Lenau and Grillparzer and Anastasius Grün gathered at the Café Griensteidl every day or twice a week, and who, with his infinitely dignified manner, would occasionally tell a story in his own way about one of these literary greats when you happened to be waiting for a newspaper. As I said, Jakob Julius David also occasionally appeared in the circle of people there. Actually, David only emerged in Austrian intellectual life at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s. When you sat with him, he spoke little; he listened even less when people spoke to him because he was severely hard of hearing. He was very severely short-sighted and usually spoke from a compressed soul, from a soul that had experienced how often in life what we call fate weighs heavily on the soul. When I spoke to the half-blind and half-deaf man, I often thought how strongly Austrian identity was expressed in this personality, who had gone through a difficult youth, a youth full of privation and poverty in the valley of the Hanna, in the valley through which the March flows, where German, Hungarian and Slavic populations border on each other and are mixed everywhere. If you drive down from this valley to Vienna, you will pass poor huts everywhere; this was especially the case when David was young. But these humble huts often have people as inhabitants, each of whom harbors in his soul the Austrian problem, that which, in all its broad specificity, contains the Austrian problem, the whole diversity of life that challenges the soul. This diversity, which wants to be experienced, which cannot be dismissed with a few concepts, with a few ideas, lives in these strange, in a certain way closed natures. If I wanted to characterize what these natures are like, which David has described as being particularly prevalent in Austrian life, I would have to say: they are natures that feel deeply the suffering of life, but they also have something in them that is not so common in the world: the ability to endure suffering to a certain extent. It is even difficult to find words for what is made of the often arduous experience, especially in these Austrian regions. There is no sentimentality, but a strong ability to experience the diversity of life, which of course brings about clashes, even among the lowest peasant classes. But this does not turn into a weariness of life, into some kind of world-weary mood. It transforms itself into something that is not defiance and yet has the strength of defiance. It transforms itself, if I may say so, weakness into strength. And this strength is realized in the area in which it finds itself through the necessities of life. And weakness, which in a sense had been transformed into strength, showed itself in David. This man was half blind and half deaf. But he once said to me: “Yes, my eyes cannot see much in the distance, but all the more so when using a microscope, I see close up.” That is to say, up close he observed everything exactly through his eyes as if through a microscope; but he looked at it so closely that one must say: In what he saw with his eyes, there was something great that intervened, explaining and illuminating what was behind it. And as a substitute for the wide-ranging view, this man had a deep gaze in the small field of vision that he overlooked with his microscopic eyes, an obsession with getting behind the reasons for things. And that was transferred to his entire mental life. This allowed him to see the people he wanted to describe, deep, deep into their hearts. And as a result, he was able to depict many, many types of Austrian life in poetry, drama, novellas, and even lyric poetry. How this entire Austrian mood can form in the soul, not into sentimentality, but into a certain inner strength, which is not defiance, but contains the strength of defiance, is particularly evident where Jakob Julius David speaks for himself. There he says:

Almighty! Thou hast taken much from me,
Thou alone knowest what I have lost;
My eye sees the beautiful world blurred,
And only muffled, muffled and quiet
Life's sounds come to my ailing ear.
Once it hurt me – and for my own good,
I thank you today that I previously criticized you
You have spared me much sorrow, many horrors
Saved me from hearing and seeing...

Indeed, the man was such that he did not have to see and hear many things in order to bring out of the depths of his soul many things that he wanted to embody poetically. As I said, I would like to show what is expressed in such Austrian sounds in individual symptoms. And one must not introduce a touch of sentimentality when Jakob Julius David speaks of his fate in this way:

In the west you see gray in the valley
The heaviest clouds hang –
That reminds me of the days,
Which have passed for me...

In the east, asleep in the light of the storm, That is my today...

But this “today” he uses up, he exhausts it, and for him it became the possibility of describing Austrian folklore in such a way that everywhere, quite remarkably, one sees individual destinies in his work – many of his novellas have only a few characters. These individual destinies make one say: The way in which the characters collide with each other because they are placed next to each other in the world by kinship or otherwise is extremely moving and takes us deep into realities. But what Jakob Julius David captures so, I would say, microscopically and yet movingly and vividly, very rarely occurs in such a way that a large painting of world history is not somehow behind it, with the individual event taking place against its backdrop.

This contextual thinking of the small, which does not become shadowy and blurred because it appears on such a background, that this letting the small happen is colored by the greatness of world-historical becoming, that is what we find to be the most characteristic of a well-known Austrian poet, but one who unfortunately is not well enough known. We are talking about the greatest poet of Austria in the second half of the nineteenth century, the poet whose home we find if we go just a little way west from the home of Jakob Julius David: we are talking about Robert Hamerling.

It is remarkable how the traits exhibited by individual personalities within Austrian intellectual life seem to clash, but when viewed from a certain higher perspective, they present themselves as qualities alongside other qualities, flowing together into a great harmony. It is remarkable: Karl Julius Schröer did not want to accept Robert Hamerling at all. To him he was a poet of secondary importance, a poet who, above all, is said to have destroyed his poetic power through his erudition. On the other hand, in Robert Hamerling there is the same attitude, the same noblest grasp of the German essence that I tried to describe in such a characteristic personality as Karl Julius Schröer. But that too is typical of Hamerling, and what I am describing to you here as typical personalities can be found in many, many others in Austrian life. I am trying to pick out only the characteristic traits that can really be presented as individual traits, but in such a way that they can stand for the whole. What is peculiar about Robert Hamerling is that he grows out of the smallest things. He comes from the Waldviertel in Lower Austria, from that poor region that bears its fruit only with difficulty because the soil is rocky and covered with forest, a region that is cozy and charming, and can be particularly enchanting in its hilly nature. Out of this peculiar nature and out of the limitations of the human character, Robert Hamerling's great spirit emerged. And he grew into a similar understanding of the German character to that of Karl Julius Schröer's spirit. We see this in one of Robert Hamerling's best poems, 'Germanenzug', where the way in which the German spirit lived in Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, is particularly clearly expressed. The ancient Germans move from Asia and camp on the Caucasus. Wonderfully, I would say, with magical vividness, it is described how evening falls, how the sun goes down, twilight reigns, the moon appears, how the entire army of Teutons camps, sleep spreads and only the one blond-haired , the spirit of Asia appears to him, releasing his people to Europe, and how the spirit of Asia permeates Teut with that which is in store for the Teutons up to their development in Germanness through history. There the great becomes great, but there also, with noble criticism, what is to be blamed is already expressed. There many a trait that especially people like Robert Hamerling see in Germanness is expressed by the goddess Asia. There the future is spoken of:

But however proudly you aspire, highly soaring, always still a blaze
you will keep the ancient sacred fire.
The dream-filled
drunkenness of God will live on in you...
You only strive because you love: your boldest thought
will be devotion that wants to sink into God.

Thus spoke Asia to the blonde Teut, the leader of the Germanic peoples to Europe, speaking in advance of the genius of Germanness, and continuing:

Do you know the highest path for your struggle
When you grow strong in certain unity in the future?
Do you know the beacons in the sea of time
Which, beckoning afar with the flame of purity,
Bring you to the last, most beautiful goal?
High above, they shine with an eternal radiance
The sacred ideals
Of humanity: freedom, justice, and light and love!
These are the last fully glowing flames
of the original light - to stir them up all together
into one glow in the quarrelling hustle and bustle
of the life of nations: that is your mission...

And Robert Hamerling could not help but consider the details that he presents, for example, as an epic poet or as a playwright, in the context of the great spiritual development of humanity. I would say that all these observers over there in Austria have something in common with microscopic vision, which, however, wants to reach beneath the surface of things; and Robert Hamerling shows it most beautifully. And they have something in common with western Austria, of which one can say: it has a certain right to place the individual within the greater whole. Because the way the valleys stand between the mountains in some areas of western Austria is expressed in turn in what lives in a poet like Robert Hamerling. We can see that a great variety of things are expressed in this Austrian intellectual life, in all its sides, which may perhaps repel each other, but which nevertheless represent a diversity that is unity in the whole picture of culture that one can draw.

And in this diversity, the sounds that come from other nationalities combine not in disharmony, but in a certain sense in harmony. It is of course not possible to say anything specific about what sounds from other nationalities into Austrian intellectual life as a whole. Only a few symptoms will be characterized. For example, within Czech literature – with regard to these descriptions, I must of course be cautious, since I do not speak Czech – we have a newer poet, a recently deceased poet, who, as someone who wrote about him put it, has become for his people something similar to what was said about a great Czech musician: that he was there like a whale in a carp pond. That is how Jaroslav Vrchlický is placed in the spiritual life of his people. In his works, the whole of world history comes to life: the oldest human life of the distant past, Egyptian, European life of the Middle Ages and modern times, Jewish intellectual life, the whole of world history comes to life in his lyric poetry, comes to life in his dramas, in his stories, and is alive everywhere. This Jaroslav Vrchlicky – his real name is Emil Frida – has an incredible productivity. And when you consider that this man has translated a large, large area of the literature of other nations for his nation, in addition to his own extremely widespread production, then you can appreciate what such a mind means for his nation. I have to read to you, because otherwise I might forget to mention some of the poets of world literature that Vrchlicky has translated for Czech literature: Ariosto, Tasso, Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi, Calderon, Camöens, Moliere, Baudelaire, Rostand, Victor Hugo, Byron, Shelley, Gorki, Schiller, Hamerling, Mickiewicz, Balzac, Dumas and others. It has been calculated that Vrchlicky alone translated 65,000 verses by Tasso, Dante and Ariosto. And yet this man was, I would say, the very embodiment of his nationality. When he emerged on the scene in the stormy 1870s – he was born in 1853 – it was a difficult time for his nation, with all the contradictions that had arisen; in relation to the Germans, all sorts of opposing factions had emerged within his own nation. At first he was much contested. There were people who said he could not write Czech; there were people who made fun of what Vrchlicky wrote. But that stopped very soon. He forced recognition. And in 1873 he was, one might say, like an angel of peace among the terribly feuding parties. He was recognized by all, and in his popular poetic works he resurrected entire paintings of world developments from all of them; just not – and this is striking – anything from Russian folklore! A man who wrote a short biography about him – before the war – expressly warned in this biography: one should see from this man in particular how little foundation there is for the fairy tale that the Czechs, or the western Slavs in general, have something to expect from the great Russian empire when they look within, as is often said.

We see this expansion in a different way, this: to see the individual experience against the background of the great interrelationships of humanity and the world — we see it in a different way in a poet whom I already referred to in my last lecture on Austrianness, the Hungarian poet Emmerich Madách. Madách was born in 1823. Madách wrote, one must say, truly imbued with a full Magyar spirit, among other things that cannot be mentioned here, The Tragedy of Man. This The Tragedy of Man is again something that does not tie in with the great events of humanity, but directly represents these events of humanity themselves. And one would like to say how Madách, the Magyar, the native of eastern Austria, presents this “tragedy of man”, which differs, for example, from the figures that Hamerling, in his own way, created out of the great painting of world history in “Ahasver”, “King of Sion”, “Aspasia”. They differ as the mountains of western Austria differ from the wide plains of eastern Austria, or rather – and I would like to be more precise here – as the soul, when it rises in the often so beautiful – especially when they are bathed in sunlight – valleys of western Austria and lets its gaze wander over the mountains that border these valleys, — how the soul, in this absorption, differs from that mood of going out into the wide open, but indefinite, that overcomes it when the Hungarian puszta, with its wide plain character, affects that soul. You know from Lenau's poetry, what this Hungarian puszta can become for the human soul.

A remarkable poem, this “Tragedy of Man”. We are placed directly at the beginning of creation. God appears alongside Lucifer. Adam dreams the future world history under Lucifer's influence. This happens in nine significant cultural images. In the beginning, we are introduced to the Lord and Lucifer; Lucifer, who wants to assert himself in his entire being towards the creator of this existence, into which the being of man is intertwined. And Lucifer admonishes the creator of the world that he is also there and that he is of the same age as the creator of the world himself. In a sense, the Creator must accept Lucifer as his helper. We hear the significant words in the poem: “If the negation” - namely Lucifer - “has even the slightest hold, your world will soon unhinge it.” With this, Lucifer threatens the creative spirit. The Lord hands Lucifer two trees, the tree of knowledge and the tree of immortality. But with these, Lucifer tempts man. And he tempts Adam, thereby causing Adam to lose paradise. And outside of paradise, Lucifer introduces Adam to what in the visions of Madách is the knowledge of the forces of nature, of the whole fabric of forces that can be gained through knowledge of man through the natural phenomena unfolding before the senses. It is the invisible cobweb of natural laws that Lucifer teaches Adam outside of paradise. And then we are shown how Lucifer makes Adam dream of the more distant fate of the world. There we see how Adam is re-embodied as a Pharaoh in ancient Egypt, and Eve, in her re-embodiment, meets him as the wife of a slave who is mistreated. Adam is seized by a deep melancholy; that is, he sees it in his dream, in which his later life, all his later embodiments, appear before the soul's eye. He sees it in such a way that he is seized by deep bitterness about what is to become of the world. And further, we are shown how Adam is re-embodied in Athens as Miltiades, how he must experience the ingratitude of the people; further, we are shown how he has to observe the declining culture and the penetration of Christianity in ancient Rome, in the imperial period. Among crusaders later in Constantinople, Adam comes to us in a new life. He is embodied again as Kepler at the court of Emperor Rudolf; as Danton during the French Revolutionary period. Then he is embodied again in London. There he becomes acquainted with that through which, according to the view of Madách, Lucifer has a characteristic effect on the present. The words must already be spoken that are written in it: “Everything is a market where everyone trades, buys, cheats, business is cheating, cheating is business.” It was not written under the influence of the war, because the poem was written in the 1860s. Then, in a later life, Adam is led to the end of time on Earth, to a landscape of ice, and so on. It is undoubtedly interesting, but one would also like to say that, like the Hungarian steppes, which extend into infinity and leave much incomprehensible and unsatisfactory – that is how this poem is. And only sporadically do we realize that the poet actually means that the whole thing is a dream that Lucifer inspires in Adam. And what the poet really wants to say is that this is how the world would be if only Lucifer were at work. But man also has an effect. Man has to seek his strength and counteract Lucifer. But this is hardly hinted at, only, I would like to say, hinted at at the end, but in such a way that what appears as positive in the face of the negative, in the face of sadness, in the face of suffering, must also be summarized, like suffering that develops into defiant strength. “Fight and trust” is what Adam is taught. But what man can fight for is not shown at all. What the world would become if it were left to nature alone is depicted. And this poem has grown out of a deep inner life and a difficult life experience.

Madách is also one of those natures who, in a different way, can be characterized by saying: Oh, this diversity of life, which is linked to the historical conditions of Austria, passed through his soul; but at the same time also the strength to transform weakness into strength.

Madách comes from old Hungarian nobility. He grew up in the Neögrader district. He lost his father very early. His mother was a spiritually strong woman. Madách became a dreamy, contemplative person. In 1849, after the revolution, he took in a refugee who was already gone when the police came looking for him; but the police still came to the conclusion that Madách had taken in this refugee. Madách was put on trial and sentenced to four years in prison. It was not so much the prison, which he accepted as an historical necessity, that had a severely distressing effect on Madách, but the fact that he had to separate from his wife, from his family, who was like his other self, whom he loved most tenderly, and that he not see her, not share in this life for four years, was devastating to him, that was the real hard blow of fate that made him doubt humanity, if it had not been for the fact that every hour he spent in prison was followed by the hope: you will see her again then. And so he wrote his poems, in which he imagined going through the door. Even after he was actually released, he wrote the last of these poems on the way home, in which he wonderfully describes the heaven that would now receive him. And he really did come home. The woman he loved so tenderly had meanwhile become unfaithful to him, she had left with another. And through the gate through which he wanted to enter in the sense of the poem he had written, he had to enter his treacherously abandoned home. In visions, the traitor and his betrayal often stood before his eyes. It was from such sources that his historical and human feelings, his feelings about the world, were formed. This must certainly be borne in mind if one is to appreciate this poetry, to which one might possibly have many objections.

For that is the point – and it would be interesting to develop this in detail – that the diversity that is in Austrian life and that is brought about by such things as I have mentioned can, again and again, broaden one's view and present one with tasks, so that one must directly link one's own experiences to the great experiences of humanity, yes, to the tasks of humanity. And just as with Hamerling, although he spent half his life on his sickbed, every poetic note he uttered was connected with the most direct experience, so too with Emmerich Madách on the other hand.

You see, this diversity – one can ask: did it have to be forged in the course of human development in Central Europe? Is there any necessity in this? If you look at the matter more closely, you do indeed get an insight into such a necessity, to find the most diverse human minds in a single area of space also united in shared destinies. And I would like to say that it always seemed to me like a symbol of what is present in the national community, in the diversity of the people, that nature, and strangely enough especially around Vienna, has already created something of a great diversity in the earth. Geologically, the so-called Vienna Basin is one of the most interesting areas on earth. As if in an earthly microcosm, as in a small Earth, everything that interacts with each other is brought together, but it also symbolizes what can explain to you that which is otherwise spread over the Earth's surface. And for those who have an interest in and an understanding of scientific observations, the contemplation of this Vienna Basin, with the numerous secrets of the Earth's formation that can be studied there, is deeply inspiring. One is tempted to say that the Earth itself develops a diversity that is bound into a unity in the center of Europe. And what is geologically present in the Earth is basically only reflected in what takes place above this Earth's surface in the minds of human beings.

I say all this not to make propaganda for Austria, but only to describe a characteristic feature. But this characteristic feature comes to the fore when one wants to describe Austria. And, I would like to say, when one goes into the field of exact science, of geology, one finds in Austria something that corresponds to what Austria's great poets claim as their most distinctive feature. If you observe Hamerling, if you observe Jakob Julius David, if you consider other great Austrian poets: the characteristic feature is that they all want to tie in with the great destiny of humanity. And that is also what gives them the most intimate and profound satisfaction. A man who was a friend of mine wrote a novel at the time, to Hamerling's great satisfaction, in which he attempted to express medieval knowledge in the form of individual figures in terms of cultural history. The novel is called “The Alchemist”. It is by Fritz Lemmermayer. And Fritz Lemmermayer is not an outstanding talent. He is even a talent who, after this novel, has hardly achieved anything significant again. But one can see that the essence that runs through the nation can take hold of the individual and find characteristic expression even in this untalented person, in all his volition.

As I said, even in the exact science of geology, something like this can come to the fore. It is probably a deep necessity that this is the case with the great Viennese geologist Eduard Sueß, perhaps one of the greatest geologists of all time, to whom we owe the study of the conditions of the Vienna Basin. Just the sight of this Vienna Basin, with its tremendous diversity, which in turn combines into a wonderful unity, could instinctively give rise to a great, powerful geological idea, which comes to light in this man and of which one must say that it could only have been developed from the Austrian character, for Eduard Sueß is an archetypally Austrian personality in his entire being: this unity in diversity, I would say, this microscopic imprint of the entire geology of the earth in the Vienna Basin. This is evident in the fact that Eduard Sueß, in our time, that is, in the last third of the nineteenth century, was able to make the decision to create a three-volume work, “The Face of the Earth,” a book in which everything that lives and works and has lived and worked in the earth in geological terms is pieced together into a significant, rounded image on a large scale, so that the earth becomes visible. Every aspect is treated with exactitude, but when one beholds the entire face of the Earth as Sueß has created it, the Earth appears as a living being, so that one immediately sees: Geology comes from the earth. If one followed Suess further, something would be created in which the planet would be directly connected to the whole cosmos. Suess takes the earth so far in this respect that, to a certain extent, the earth is alive and one only has the need to ask further: How does this earth live in the whole cosmos, now that it has been understood geologically?

Just as much in Austrian poetry is connected with the Austrian landscape and Austrian nature, so I believe that the geology of Austria in the narrower sense is connected with the fact that, perhaps, in the spiritual life of humanity: that from Vienna this book in the field of geology could arise, this book, which is just as exactly scientifically as ingeniously assessed and executed and in which really everything that geology has created up to Sueß is processed in an overall picture, but in such a way that one really believes at last that the whole earth is no longer the dead product of the usual geology, but as a living being. I believe that in this area, precisely what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity plays into the scientific achievements—by no means in any way into the objectivity of the sciences, which is certainly not endangered by this—what could come from Eduard Sueß's Austrian identity. And when you look into this Austrianness in so many different areas, you realize that figures like those created by Jakob Julius David really do exist, in whom a single trait of the soul often takes hold because the difficulties of life have pushed aside the others, and fills them so completely that the individual soul has its strength, but also its power and its reassurance and its consolation. These figures become particularly interesting when these souls mature into people of knowledge.

And there is a figure from the Upper Austrian countryside, from the Ischl area – I have already referred to the name in the previous lecture – there is the remarkable farmer and philosopher Conrad Deubler. If you imagine every figure that Jakob Julius David created from Austrian life to be a little younger, if you imagine the events of this life that shaped this life later to be absent and imagine them in the soul of Conrad Deubler, then any such figure could become Conrad Deubler. Because this Conrad Deubler is also extremely characteristic of the people of the Austrian Alpine countries. Born in Goisern in the Ischl region, he becomes a miller, later an innkeeper, a person who is deeply predisposed to be a person of insight. When I now speak about Conrad Deubler, I ask that it not be taken as discordant to point out that, of course, a world view such as Conrad Deubler's is not represented here; that it is always emphasized that one must go beyond what Conrad Deubler thought in order to achieve a spiritualization of the world view. But what matters is not clinging to certain dogmas, but being able to recognize the honesty and justification of every human striving for knowledge. And even if one cannot agree with anything that Conrad Deubler actually professed, the contemplation of this personality, especially in connection with characteristics of Austrian life, means something that is typical and significant in particular, in that it expresses how, from within those circumstances, there is a striving for wholeness that, in many respects, can be compared spiritually to being spatially enclosed by mountains. Conrad Deubler is an insightful person, despite not even having learned to write properly, despite having had very little schooling. Jakob Julius David calls the personalities he describes and sketches “musers.” In my home region of Lower Austria, the Waldviertel, they would have been called “simulators.” These are people who have to go through life musing, but who associate something sensitive with musing, who find much to criticize in life. In Austria, we call this “raunzing” about life. People grumble about life a lot. But this criticism is not dry criticism; this criticism is something that is immediately transformed into inner life, especially in figures like Conrad Deubler. He is a man of insight from the very beginning, even though he couldn't write properly. He is always going for books. In his youth, he starts with a good book, a book that aspires from the sensual to the spiritual: Grävell, “Der Mensch” (Man). Deubler reads this in 1830 (he was born in 1814), and Sintenis, “Der gestirnte Himmel” (The Starry Sky), Zschokke's “Stunden der Andacht” (Hours of Devotion). But he doesn't really feel at home with these things, he can't go along with these things. He is a contemplative by nature, and he is imbued with enthusiasm to find satisfaction for the soul not only for himself, but also for those who inhabit his village with him. Something in these people is striving out of the traditional worldview. Then Conrad Deubler becomes acquainted with the ideas that most deeply moved and stirred the times at that time – he becomes acquainted with writings that were written out of the spirit of Darwinism. He becomes acquainted with Ludwig Feuerbach, with David Friedrich Strauss. Later he becomes acquainted with the writings of Ernst Haeckel, but this is later. He reads all of this, devouring it. I will mention in passing that he was sentenced to several years in prison for dealing with such reading material and reading such things to his fellow villagers, and for founding a kind of library for his fellow villagers. It was from 1852 to 1856 – for religious disturbance, blasphemy and spreading blasphemous views! But as I said, I only mention this in passing, because Conrad Deubler bore the whole thing manfully. For him, it was a matter of penetrating to knowledge out of a fundamental urge of his soul. And so we see in this farmer what we may see in another spirit, I would say, on a higher plane of life, at the very end. We see in this spirit how attempts are made to reconcile the scientific way of thinking with the deepest needs of the soul. That Conrad Deubler could arrive at a purely naturalistic-materialistic view of life should, as I said, not concern us. For what matters is not that, but that in such people there lives the urge to see nature itself spiritualized. Even if they initially only accept it sensually, in them all lives the urge to accept nature spiritually. And from such a view of nature, a spiritualized view of life must nevertheless arise in the course of human evolution. So this simple farmer has gradually become a famous personality, especially among the most enlightened spirits of the materialistic epoch. He was an enthusiastic traveler and not only learned in his early youth in Vienna what he wanted to learn, he also traveled to Feuerbach in Nuremberg. But it is particularly interesting how his inn in Goisern became a place of residence for the most important people in the field of natural science and natural philosophy. Haeckel repeatedly stopped at Deubler's, staying there for weeks at a time. Feuerbach often stopped there. Deubler corresponded with David Friedrich Strauß, with the materialist Vogt, with the so-called fat Vogt, with all kinds of people, and we should not be disturbed by the unorthographic, the ungrammatical, but rather we should be struck by the unspoilt nature of the man of knowledge.

And I would like to say that this trait, which in Deubler appears in the rustic and coarse, appears in the man, whom I already referred to in the previous lecture, in a highly subtle way: Bartholomäus von Carneri, the real Austrian philosopher of the last third of the nineteenth century. Carneri is also the type of mind that is initially overwhelmed by Darwinism, but which shows all the more clearly how impossible it is for him to really accept science as it is accepted in Central Europe; how it is impossible for such a mind not to link science to the innermost striving of the human being, not to seek the path that leads from science to religious deepening and religious contemplation. Bartholomäus von Carneri is precisely one of those minds for whom it is true when Asia says to the blond Teut that the most serious thinking in the German spirit wants to arise out of love and come to the intimacy of God. Even if this intimacy with God comes to us, as it were, in atheistic clothing in Carneri, it still comes to us from the most intense and honest spiritual striving. Carneri, as a philosopher and as a man of world-view, stands entirely on the ground of the view that everything that is spirit can only appear to man in matter. And now Carneri is under the influence of a strange delusion. One could say that he is under the influence of the delusion that he now regards the world in terms of nothing but concepts and ideas, in terms of nothing but perceptions and sensations that are born of the spirit, with which he believes he can grasp and comprehend only material things, only the sensual. When someone looks at something sensual, says Carneri, this sensuality can be divided, but the division goes only so far that we can survey this limited thing with our senses. But when the division continues, when the differentiation becomes so fine that no sense can oversee it, then what lives in the differentiated material must be grasped by thinking, and then it is spirit, - spiritually out of the belief that actually only the natural is naturally understood. This is very characteristic, because Carneri's world view is really instinctive spiritualized materialism; one could even say purest spiritualism. And only through the trend of the times, through the effect of the times, did the deception arise that what Carneri speaks of can only be meant spiritually, when in fact it is fundamentally only expressions of the material. But what Carneri grasps so instinctively idealistically, consciously naturalistically, he must necessarily attach to ethics. And what man works out for himself in the way of morals becomes, for Carneri, because he strives for a certain monism of world view, only a sum of higher natural laws. And so Carneri, precisely because he is subject to the characterized deception, transfers the moral, the highest impulses of moral action, into the human soul like natural impulses. And there one sees particularly what is actually at work in minds like Carneri's. In their youth, they lived in a world view that made a fundamental distinction between spirit and nature. They could not reconcile this with the urge of their souls. What science has produced in three to four centuries, these minds had grasped instinctively: No, nature cannot be what it is or should be according to the old traditions; in many of its aspects, nature cannot simply be an abandoned child of the gods. What is the lawfulness of the world must live in nature.

And yet, although such people only wanted to be naturalists, it was basically the urge to give nature its spirit, which lived in them. This is what makes these men so extraordinarily characteristic. And if it can be shown, even in the case of Sueß, the geologist, how his nationality gave a special human colouring to his great work on geology, the same could be shown in the case of a philosopher like Carneri, if one were now to follow his inner life. Precisely what emerges from the observation with regard to the lawful connection between the most diverse nationally colored human minds, as they can be found in Austria, had the particular effect that there, in complicated form, in manifold form, human images stepped before the soul in such a way that riddle upon riddle arose. And in looking at human experiences, at people one has before one daily, one looked at something where the natural plays up into the moral and the moral plays down again into the natural. So it was that in Carneri a noble ethical world view of the historical course of humanity was intimately mixed with a certain naturalism, which, however, is basically only a transitional product, a transitional from which most of all that could be found as a later stage is represented here as a spiritual science, if one is only aware that everything in the world needs its historical development.

Thus, in Carneri's work, a certain view of the ethical, historical ethical life of humanity is combined with the natural life. For him, natural life and historical life merge into one. He sharpens his view of the natural phenomena he has observed so wonderfully, I might say so lovingly and intimately, for the phenomena of humanity, insofar as they take place between nation and nation. The one always clarifies the other. And Carneri had the opportunity, in particular, to be able to contribute to the development of Austria's destiny because he was a member of the Austrian Parliament for a long time and because he absorbed the basic conditions of Austria at that time in the most honest way into his soul. He was born in Trento in 1821, the son of a senior Austrian civil servant. It is remarkable that today I often have to describe personalities to you who were outwardly tormented by deep suffering. Carneri was a twin child. His twin sister developed quite well. But from the beginning he was afflicted with a curvature of the spine. He was ill all his life, paralyzed down one side. He also corresponded with Conrad Deubler. And although I have already been made aware from another source of what Carneri's external life was like, I would still like to present to you the words that Carneri wrote to Deubler on October 26, 1881, so that you can see what an extraordinarily physically tormented man Carneri was. “Do you know,” Carneri wrote to Deubler, ”that the description of your home has made my heart very heavy? It reminded me of the time when I was healthy. I have the forest just behind the house and I have not entered it for years because I can only walk on completely flat paths. I have long since renounced any higher enjoyment of nature, but also everything that is called social entertainment. Incidentally, I can't say that I feel any less happy as a result. Due to a muscle cramp in my neck (torticollis intermittens), which often extends across half of my body, my existence is an extraordinarily arduous one. But I don't mind, and that's what matters. In short, it will be difficult for me to visit you; but if it is feasible one day, I will. We are sticking together, even without knowing each other face to face, and that's the main thing."

And I have read here before how the Austrian poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, who knew Carneri well, described the exterior of Carneri from a moving scene. She describes it as follows: ”... “How could you bear it, all these years, and still keep that smile, that kindness and joy of life?” I cried out in agony when Carneri suffered such an attack in my presence. Slowly he raised his head, which had sunk low on his chest, wiped the sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his trembling left hand, breathed deeply and looked at me with a look that was once again all sun and willpower. “How so?” he smiled. ‘But don't you understand that in my daily struggle with such a beast, I wanted to remain a man, and become a man I had to? I —, he smiled again, ’just had my ambitions. That‘, he pointed to his still-twitching body, ’should be stronger than me? Should it be able to rob me of my days? To make me loathe all the joys and beauties of life? Would I be a man if I did not remain the stronger? So it began, and so it will end.

Thus speaks one who, due to the previously described deception, believes himself to be a naturalist, but who has absorbed a noble ethic from naturalism. But he also shows us a personality that, in a certain respect, contains within itself much that is genuinely Austrian: the ability to turn a strong soul into a strong soul and not to be able to bear weakness being taken as weakness, but rather acting — was particularly developed in this Carneri. And this sense is poured over his entire philosophy. And if you read his works, you will find this sense. But you will also find the infinitely loving response to the facts of life. Incidentally, it already emerges in his poems, in his various writings, which appeared as early as 1840. And the whole of Carneri – it was wonderful to look at him. He stands before me as I look down from the gallery of the Austrian House of Representatives. It was always an important day when one knew that Carneri would speak. Carneri, who was half paralyzed, who could only walk on flat paths, who could only speak in such a way that half of his tongue participated in the speaking, so to speak, that only half of his brain was only half thinking. This Carneri had conquered his physicality; that he now stood there and that his speech was imbued with the most tremendous acumen, with which he saw through everything that could be seen through, that could be condemned. And everywhere he found the right words, which shot like an arrow at those who were to be hit, and which could everywhere inspire those who wanted to be inspired. Carneri was far too much of an idealist for his speeches to always be followed by action. But his speeches were feared in a certain way. In a scholarly way, he presented to his parliament what he carried in his whole thinking – one might say: Austria. This lived and this spoke. And whether he spoke where he could agree with something or whether he spoke as an opponent – that which was discerning Austrian patriotism always spoke through Carneri; such a patriotism, which seeks the tasks of this Austrian national community in the whole historical development of mankind. And even when he spoke about individual matters, not in abstract terms but with all the color of his speech, a great historical trend came to life. And even when he had to reproach, when he had to reproach bitterly, I would say that in his thoughts the blood relationship between this thinker Carneri and Austrian-ness came to life. Therefore, anyone who is aware of this can never forget how the words of one of his last speeches must have sounded from Carneri's mouth, where he saw some things approaching that the opponents of Central Europe had overestimated, that were not as the opponents of Central Europe believed, but that could have been brought about by many out of lack of understanding. Carneri was one of those who saw it from afar, but who, above all, did not want to merely criticize it, so that Austria would remain truly strong. That is why his words of reproach had such an effect that they could remain in the soul. And those who heard such words of reproach, such words of reproach imbued with the deepest feeling, which he uttered in one of his last most brilliant speeches, where he said: “I document thereby express my conviction... which can be summarized in two words, two words which — and I have experienced many a serious moment in my sixty years — I utter for the first time in my life today: Poor Austria!” That such words could be spoken, that there were people who felt that way, is where the forces lie that today have their counter-image in the vilifications of Austria's opponents, outside of Austria, among the enemies of Austria. In Carneri, something of the spirit of those who, in all their diversity, strove to bring Austria powerfully into harmony, because they understood the necessity of the harmony of this diversity, lived.

In the end, he went blind. He celebrated his eightieth birthday in 1900 – by then he had gone blind. As a blind man, he wrote his Dante translation at the time. He dictated from memory, because he had Dante's Divine Comedy in his soul and was able to translate it from memory. At that time, his life was behind him. In many, it lives on, in more people than one might think. He had become blind, weak. As a blind man, he sat in a wheelchair; he had eighty years behind him, sixty years of work. “Realized” - I say this in parentheses - when this man was eighty years old and blind, the University of Vienna ‘recognized’ him by awarding him the doctorate as an eighty-year-old blind man and declaring that it understood something of his merits, with the words: ”We highly appreciate that you have been able to give your scientific ideas such a form that they are able to penetrate into further circles of the people, and that your honorable sir, in addition to the noblest devotion to Austria, has always represented those principles of freedom in your public activities, without whose unreserved recognition a successful advancement of knowledge and scientific work is not possible.” One must be glad that such things as Carneri has done for the benefit of his country and, dare I say it, for the benefit of humanity, are at least recognized; even if one can become eighty years old, blind and deaf before they are recognized. Well, that is the way things are going today.

Unfortunately, I have already taken up far too much of your time; but I could continue at length by attempting to describe, not by means of description, but by means of symptoms, in which, I believe - not always in such a refined way, of course - Austrian folklore lives, but which also shows what this Austrian folklore is when it can show itself in its noblest blossoms. I have mentioned these noblest blossoms because I believe that it is good if the population of Central Europe gets to know each other better in our difficult times, also in a spiritual sense. For time is forging a whole out of this Central Europe, and a unified spirit already prevails in this whole. And the better we get to know this unified spirit, the more alive it will appear to us, and the more we will be able to trust it. All the more will one be able to believe that, despite all misunderstanding, it cannot be overcome. In the German representatives of Central Europe there lives, in many cases, what I have already had to characterize as not simply an instinctive devotion to nationality, but an ideal to which one wants to develop, which consists in spirituality and in the development of strength, which one can only approach and which one can only truly appreciate when one regards it in connection with what leads to the salvation of all mankind. Indeed, there is something about the most German of Germans when they speak of their nationality that others cannot understand; for never does anything else live in the Germans but the duty: You must develop what wants to live through your nationality in the world! The duty to develop is, in a sense, to be national. Hence the constant urge to place one's own nationality within the context of the goals of all humanity. And so it was with Carneri, that in his soul-searching he found what, ethically, must be connected as the basic features of the development of all humanity with natural law. For him, this was one. But he regarded it with such love that for him the Germanic ideals were also part of the historical development of all mankind. And he could compare, and only because he really compared, he felt entitled to think about the Germanic as he did. I would have much more to say about it, but there is not enough time. A mind like Carneri's first looks at the essential nature of the various nations, and then he allows the value of his own nation to emerge before himself in the right image. He considers his own national substance in connection with other national substances. From this point of view, he says to himself: The freedom of all nations, the recognition of every nation, is compatible with everything German, because that lies in the whole German development. And this, for Carneri, is contradicted, for example, by the Pan-Slav ideal, which proceeds from the a priori view that supremacy must one day be granted to every nation; which works towards getting supremacy. In contrast to this, Carneri says: The leadership of the Germanic spirit, which dominates Europe and extends to the distant West, originates from the concept of morality, which, on the favorable soil that has made it flourish, bears beneficial fruits. It cannot, therefore, last any longer than this world is habitable. And precisely at the time when Carneri was a member of the Austrian parliament, the situation in Central Europe, particularly in the political sphere and in the field of political observation, was such that England and the English constitution were seen as a model. Many politicians wanted to model the constitution of all countries on the English model. And much else in England was seen as a model. Carneri was very much involved in such politics, where many of his comrades thought this way. But Carneri wanted to come to clarity. Carneri wanted to be objective in his view of humanity. But out of this objectivity arose his sense of belonging to the Germanic-Germanic essence and his objective assessment of a country like England. What I am going to share with you now, Carneri did not just write before the war – he died long before the war, after all – he wrote it in the 1860s. “England,” he says, ‘the country of continuous progress par excellence, will turn to general ideas if it is not to descend from the proud heights it has climbed. Nothing characterizes it better than the fact that it has become so ’practical' in the self-confident development of its greatness that it had to learn from the Germans that it had produced the greatest playwright in the world!” In a spirit like Carneri's, this is not just any kind of jingoism, it is a sense of belonging to the Germanic essence; a sense of belonging that arises from knowledge, that arises precisely from deep knowledge, and that does not want to allow itself to appear in the world and claim what it is entitled to claim before it can justify itself before the entire mission of humanity on earth. This is something that, whether it is spoken in Germany or in Austria, can find little understanding among the others, because it is basically the national conception of the specifically German.

With regard to Austria, however, I have, I believe, characterized something of Austrian-ness for you more than descriptive words can, by showing some of living people. And I hope that I have characterized Austrian character in these living people in such a way that, through the contemplation of these living people, the conviction can arise that this Austria is not just a motley collection, brought together by some arbitrary act, but that it corresponds to an inner necessity. The people I have tried to present to you prove this. And they prove this, I think, by the fact that one can say of them, as of deeply thinking souls, seeking a world view or an art out of a deep temperament, what has been said in another area and in another respect with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky. The saying that was then repeated was once said with reference to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky: “In your camp is Austria!” I believe that one can expand on this saying and say of such people, as I have tried to interpret for you, that in their searching souls Austria lives, Austria lives as something that they feel is a necessity: “In their thoughts Austria lives!” And I believe that Austria lives in a very lively way.

My dear Friends,

We shall find that a study of the history of dramatic art can throw considerable light for us on the problems that face us in that field today. For only gradually has dramatic art made its way into the evolution of mankind. What for us comprises the essentially dramatic has really only found its way, bit by bit, into the evolution of mankind; and, as we know too well, inartistic features that are hostile to the development of the art have also been continually intruding themselves. And now a time has come when to all that the centuries have so far produced, many quite new things have to be added; for mankind has advanced in evolution. Anyone who has to take part in the staging of plays will moreover receive encouragement and stimulus for his work by making a deep, esoteric study of plays that have at different epochs provided a standard or basis for the development of acting and of stage work altogether.

There are three important factors to be borne in mind when we are considering the production of a play. I do not mean that we must adhere to them pedantically, but rather that we should have an artistic perception of where and to what extent each enters into the play we have in hand. They are important for us because they have been so first for the author; they have influenced him in his composition of the play—of that written text which, as we saw, is for the actor neither more nor less than what the score is for the musician.

Taking these three in order, we find that the first hovered like an overpowering presence above the drama of ancient times, the drama that originated in the Mysteries. I mean destiny.

Look at the plays of ancient Greece. Everywhere we are shown how powerfully destiny works into human life. Man himself is of very little account; it is destiny, heaven-sent destiny, that works into his life all the time. Realising this, we can appreciate the genuine artistic impulse that lay behind the tendency to obliterate more or less whatever was individual in the human being—giving him a mask, and even going so far as to make use of instruments in order to conceal the individual quality of his voice. We can well understand how this conception of God-given destiny led to an effacement of the human individuality. Looking back then to the drama of ancient times, we find that it displayed on the stage the grand and all-powerful working of destiny; therein lay its achievement. We need only call to mind the tragedies concerned with the myth of Oedipus to see at once how true this is.

There are, however, two things that occupy a prominent place in modern drama, of which you will find little or no sign in these early dramas where the attention is centred upon the working of destiny. As a matter of fact, they could only find their way into drama as the Age of Consciousness drew near for man, the Age of the Spiritual Soul.¹

The interchange of love between human beings could not be dramatised on the stage in the way it is today until the souls of men had begun to receive each its more individual form. In the drama of ancient times you will, it is true, find love, but a love that bears the stamp of destiny and is dependent also on social relationships. An outstanding example is the figure of Antigone in the well-known play of Sophocles. But that love between the sexes which enters later with such compelling power into drama, even itself forms and shapes the drama—becomes possible only with the dawn of the Age of Consciousness.

The other thing that you will miss in the early days of dramatic art is humour. Look, for example, at the plays of Aristophanes, who has been dubbed the scoffer, and compare them with the plays of the time when the impulse of the Age of Consciousness was beginning to make itself felt. You may take any number of plays of the Aristophanes type, and you will constantly find satyrs taking part in them; but you will look in vain for the humour that sets something free in man, that gives wings to human life. That does not show itself in drama until man is entering upon the Age of Consciousness.

Note too, that this is also the time when men's gaze, as they look upon the stage, begins to be turned aside from destiny, begins rather to take a kind of delight in the way that man makes himself master and shaper of destiny. Attention and interest are now, in fact, being increasingly directed, instead of to destiny, to character. So here we have come to the second factor that we have to consider in staging a play—character. The dramatist puts on the stage men and women as we meet with them in life; and as his presentation of them develops, they become more and more interesting.

We shall not yet find a power of vision that can command the whole compass of man's individuality. People are still portrayed rather more as types; and we have, instead of the old masks, the character masks. Among the Latin peoples, who took such delight in drama and were so gifted in its performance, we find these character masks—striking evidence of a dawning interest in man as an individual with a character of his own. The feeling for character still labours under the limitations of this connection with type. It is nevertheless the human being, the individual human being, who is so to speak given the mask of the character-type to which he is adjudged to belong.

There was also a very good understanding in those days of the close relation of human beings to their environment. The character mask, it was felt, can be truly appreciated only when it is seen on the background of the part of the world to which it belongs. Hence the folk masks of those times. We find them particularly in Italy; but other countries soon began to follow suit. These folk masks bear witness to an interest, not merely in men and women, nor even merely in character-types ; they mark the beginning of an interest in what character owes to milieu. And this interest spread far and wide, reaching even to Shakespeare, in whom we can still clearly recognise an appreciation of the bearing of milieu upon character.

The Italian would observe, for example, that persons of social distinction, who have a certain standing in life, and who have also money in their purses and are accordingly able to maintain a good position in society—such persons, he would observe, are to be met with especially in Venice. And so in the folk-plays of those times the Pantalone—for that was the name given to this character—would always appear on the stage in Venetian dress. He would tend also to speak with something of a Venetian accent. There, then, we have one of these character masks. We are, you see, coming away from the working of destiny, for here it is man who stands before us and claims our attention.

Let us now look at another character mask that meets us in these plays. (There were, you must know, hundreds of such plays, literally hundreds, genuine products all of the Italian genius, and you will find the wealthy ‘Merchant of Venice’ in every one of them.) The second character mask is the man of learning; and he appears in the form of a shrewd and clever lawyer. This clever lawyer always hails from Bologna, and wears the traditional robes of a lawyer who has graduated in the University of Bologna. That then is the second. The third is the scoundrel, the dodger, known as Brighella. He comes from the common people, and is always in company with the Harlequin, the simpleton, who also hails from the common people. These two fellows, the scoundrel and the simpleton, are from Bergamo and will always be dressed in Bergamese style.

And then there were the serving-women, ladies of some experience in life, who—incidentally—were capable for the most part of getting the control of the household into their own hands. It appears that in those days such ladies generally came from Rome; their costumes were accordingly in Roman style. The writers and producers of these plays were, you see, observant; no detail escaped them.

There, then, we have the transition from destiny to character. You can see what a thorough-going change it wrought in drama. And I think even the brief sketch I have given you of its history will help you to understand how important it is for the student of dramatic art to study this development of character in drama—learning to observe how characters group themselves in types, and how character grows out of milieu. When he has worked through such a study, the student will be more fitted to undertake the ‘individual’ parts of the modern stage, he will be able to tackle them with elemental force and energy.

As he studies these plays, the student will also realise what a liberating and lively humour the people of those days possessed. For it was not merely the authors who were responsible for the plays. As a matter of fact authors did not play a role of any particular importance in those days. The text of a play, as it came from their hands, could not even truthfully be called a ‘score' for the actor; before it could go down with the audience, he would have to add to it considerably from his own resources. It was quite taken for granted that the actor would supply witty sallies here and there on his own account.

Dramas of this kind show unmistakably that destiny is disappearing from the stage, and the spectators are being presented with plays where it is the characters that determine the action. This is also the moment when the stage begins to realise that it has to reckon with the audience, that it cannot ignore them.

And now, from destiny and character, from out of these two, emerges our third factor in drama: action, or plot.

At the opening of a play, before the plot began to unfold and reveal how character and destiny are at work there, an ‘Exclamator’, as he was called (for they used the Latin word), would come forward—rather in the way the Prologue does in our Christmas Plays—and give a kind of summary of the moral of the play. For the stage did a great deal in those days to influence social life and behaviour.

You are not to conclude from this that the manners and morals of those times were anything to boast of; on the contrary, it implies that they were rather loose and that there was ample reason for the stage to do something for their improvement. It is always important, you know, to look at facts from the right angle!

I would like now to describe to you one such drama. Do not take it as an exact description of a particular one (as I said before, there are hundreds of them); it will, however, be characteristic, and will provide you with a good illustration of what I want to say later.

Let us suppose then that at the beginning of one of these dramas we are faced with a situation that is created entirely by the typical characters that are there in the play. In a spot that may perhaps be not very far away from where we are now meeting, some gipsies have made their encampment. The gipsies are referred to as the ‘heathen’.

The play proceeds somewhat as follows. (The story corresponds quite well with one or another of these plays, but my intention is to make my description general and typical.) We have then, to begin with, the man Ruedi and his wife Greta, and they are talking together. Ruedi tells Greta she must take care to lock up all their valuables, because the heathen are in the neighbourhood; things are sure to be stolen, for the heathen live by stealing. Greta replies that she has of course already done this; she does not need any reminder from him. ‘But I tell you what, you drunken lout,' she goes on to say, ‘you put far more money than the heathen steal into the pockets of the alehouse keeper. And there's got to be an end of that; it can't go on any longer.’

Ruedi is rather taken aback, for Greta is a woman of force and energy. After standing silent for a minute or two, he heaves a deep sigh and stammers out: ‘Well, well, I suppose I'd better go to the gipsies and get them to tell me what a bad lot I am; after all, they're fortune-tellers as well as thieves.’

‘You great fool,' says Greta, ‘to believe the gipsies. It's all nonsense what they say. You'd much better save your money instead of running after them.’

But Ruedi is not going to be put off. Before he sets out, however, he goes to the stables and warns the stableman too about the heathen, ordering him to lock up the stables and carry the manure out to the fields. And now the stableman gets talking, and discloses to Ruedi that Greta has hidden away in the stable eight good Rhenish gulden, in those times quite a small fortune. He, the stableman, knows the spot where they are buried. Then the ‘stupid’ Ruedi begins to be sly. But first of all he goes off to the gipsies to have his fortune told.

So here destiny enters the story; but note how! People no longer believe in it, it is all left to the gipsies.

The gipsy woman says to Ruedi: ‘Well, my man, you are a thoroughly good sort; but you have a bad-tempered wife, and she makes life miserable for you. And you yourself, you know, you drink too much!’

Heavens alive, thinks Ruedi, she knows a lot! There's something in fortune-telling after all.

‘But now, look here!’ continues the gipsy,’ you go and get yourself some better clothes and walk about the village with an air, and you'll be made headman of the village—only, you'll have to drink less! ’

Ruedi is delighted with the idea. And now what the stableman told him will come in very useful. First, however, the gipsy wants her fee. Why, of course!—but Ruedi hasn't any money. Greta never gives him any. Then he has a bright idea. ‘You told me just now that if I put on fine clothes I shall be made headman of the village. When I am, I'll help you gipsies in your thieving. That shall be your payment.’ This suits the gipsy-woman splendidly; a headman's connivance will be of more worth to the gipsies than any fee.

And now Ruedi goes back home, his head full of the idea that he must get some fine new clothes and be made headman of the village. So he goes to the stable, digs up the eight gulden and hands them to the stableman to take to the neighbouring town.

Arrived there, the stableman goes to the wool merchant and says to him: ‘My master who lives outside the town wants to see some materials of different colours, I am to take them to him to choose from; he is having some new clothes made, for he is going to be headman of the village.’

‘But I don't know your master,' replies the merchant, ‘and how am I to know what might happen to my cloth?’

‘Oh, don't you worry,' says the stableman, ‘he's a perfectly honourable man. You let me take the cloth; it'll be quite all right.’ The eight gulden the stableman pockets, and the rolls of stuff he turns into money in some way of his own. And so he comes back empty-handed, having cheated his master of the eight gulden and the merchant of the rolls of cloth.

His master inquires what has happened. ‘I've left the eight gulden with the merchant,' replies the stableman, ‘and he says you must go yourself and choose the material in his shop; meantime he has the money safe.’ The money is, of course, not with the merchant at all; the stableman has taken it for himself.

At this point a scene is inserted where we are shown Greta pouring out her woes to a friend of hers. She has discovered that the gulden she buried in the stable have disappeared. What if the cow has eaten them and dies in consequence!

And now Ruedi makes his way to the wool merchant's—and behold, the merchant has not the cloth. Ruedi hasn't it either. The merchant has also not the money; nor has Ruedi. The stableman is standing by, and the merchant declares he will sue him. He will, he says, put the matter in the hands of a lawyer; and he'll find a first-rate one, he will! (Here they come, you see, the character types.)

Well, Ruedi and his stableman go home again. But a little while later a messenger comes running in great haste, beginning—in the good stage instinct of those times—to call out to them while he is still a long way off, summoning them both to come at once to the wool merchant's.

As soon as they arrive there the merchant starts inveighing loudly against the stableman—and one can well understand it. He becomes quite abusive, and rails against him, calling him all sorts of hard names The man feels terribly insulted and declares that he will on his part bring an action against the merchant, and they will soon see what comes of that!

The merchant raises no objection; he knows he has right on his side and feels confident of the issue. The stableman, however, is a kind of Brighella, and it is he who procures the cleverer lawyer.

And now the trial begins, the stableman's lawyer having in the meantime instructed him how to behave in court. The judge puts his learned questions, all in best Bologna manner The peasant grows more and more bewildered, confuses the cloth with the money, and the money with the cloth. When he should be answering about the eight gulden, he keeps talking of the cloth, and vice versa, and all because the lawyer puts him out by talking incessantly.

And now it is the stableman's turn to be questioned. But all he says in reply is: veiw!¹ A fresh question is put to him. Once more he answers: veiw! Still another question. Again the same reply: veiw! The lawyer has advised him, you see, to be completely stupid and say nothing but veiw! Eventually the judge finds this too silly. ‘He's just crazy; one can do nothing at all with a fellow like that!’—and he sends the parties home. And so the whole affair comes to a humorous end.

And now it turns out that in the course of the conversation between them, the stableman had promised his lawyer the eight gulden. These the lawyer now receives, in payment for his advice to say nothing but veiw! The stableman has the cloth. As for the peasant and the merchant, they have had all their trouble for nothing The spectator, however, goes home well pleased; he has enjoyed watching the characters unfold as the play proceeds. Pieces of this kind were played by the hundred—full of true humour, a natural, elemental humour of the common folk. And they were well played, for the players put their whole heart into their acting.

Thus, at the dawn of the Age of Consciousness, does the drama of character push its way into the drama of destiny, and take root there and grow. That is how the drama of character first began. And you will not easily find for your students a better subject for study than these very plays; for they are built up with quite remarkable skill. They can well form a basis for the study of delineation of character.

A school of dramatic art should arrange for courses of instruction in the history of the whole treatment of drama, and especially of character, beginning with the end of the fifteenth century. This kind of character drama was popular throughout the Latin countries at the end of the fifteenth century, and also in Switzerland. Afterwards, it spread to Germany and by the sixteenth century was everywhere in vogue. That is to say, at secular times of the year. For the Christmas Plays are survivals of the drama of destiny; in them we see destiny working in from the worlds beyond. So that we have in those times, on the one hand, within the rather austere forms of Christian tradition, a continued adherence to destiny, and then also this original and elemental up-springing of character in drama. Both are there, side by side; and that is what makes this second stage in the evolution of drama an extraordinarily fruitful field for study.

The mask of ancient times, that actually hid the human being, has now given place to the character mask, and we shall soon be approaching the time when we have before us on the stage human individualities. But please remember that there are good and well-founded reasons for making a special study in our day of this first beginning of character in drama. A student can learn a great deal from such a study.

Let me remind you at this point of the development we traced in Schiller's dramas a few days ago. We were studying this development from a rather different point of view; we can, however, clearly see that Schiller was all the time experimenting between the two kinds of play, inclining now more to the drama of destiny, now again more to the drama of character. Highly gifted dramatist as he was, Schiller did not know how to bring together the elements of character and destiny.

Take Wallenstein. We cannot truthfully say that destiny is here an organic part of the drama. Destiny and character are joined up externally rather in the way one cements bricks! Then again later on, in Die Braut von Messina, we find Schiller once more trying, as it were, to drag in destiny. Only in Demetrius does he at length, after many attempts, succeed in weaving together destiny and character, weaving them together to form genuine dramatic action.

Character drama is important also for opening the way to comedy. True, preparatory steps in that direction had been taken in Roman times; for there was, you know, in Rome a kind of anticipation of the Age of Consciousness. But it is tragedy that stands in the foreground throughout the centuries of classical antiquity. Satire will not infrequently come to expression in some comic afterpiece, but we do not find what can properly be called comedy until, with the coming of the Age of Consciousness, love and humour make their appearance on the stage.

If you can succeed in carrying in your mind's eye a clear picture of how drama has evolved, that will help you in your work as producer. You will then be able to approach with the right mood and feeling, on the one hand, plays where the more tragic and solemn elements prevail and, on the other hand, plays that are in a lighter vein and belong more in the realm of comedy. Your study will have given you fresh guidance for the staging of the two kinds of play.

Consider first how it is with tragedy. Simply from the insight that you have acquired in this kind of study, you will go to work in the following way. Please do not imagine it is a matter of theories and definitions. What you have to do is to prove by experience how you yourself develop an insight that can give birth to artistic creation. That is the only right way; and it is what I have been trying to show you in today's lecture.

The first part of a tragedy (sometimes called the ‘exposition’), where the spectators are to be made acquainted with the situation, where their interest has to be aroused, will have to be played slowly; and the slowness should be achieved, not so much by slow speaking or acting as by pauses, pauses between the speeches, pauses even between the scenes. This will ensure that you make contact with your audience; they will then the more easily unite themselves, inwardly and sympathetically, with the situation.

But now, as the play proceeds, new persons or events intervene, and it becomes uncertain how things will turn out. This is the middle of the play, where the plot reaches its climax. Here you will again need a rather slow tempo, but the slowness has this time to be in the speaking and in the gesturing; the play will thus still move slowly, but without pauses. Not of course entirely so; the speaker must have time to take breath, and the spectator too! But you should definitely shorten the pauses, and to that degree slightly quicken the tempo.

Then comes the third part, which has to bring the solution. If this last part were played in the same tempo, it would leave the audience a little sour and dissatisfied. It is important to increase the pace here and let the play end in a quicker tempo.

Here then, in this third part of the play, there has to be an inner quickening of tempo, showing itself both in speech and in gesture.

Tragedy

(I) in slow tempo: pauses
(II) in slow tempo: without pauses
(III) in quickened tempo.

If these stages are observed, your acting will not fail of those imponderable qualities that make for contact with the audience. And you will find that the right tempo for speech and gesture comes of itself out of the feeling that your study and training beget in you. Thus, the main point for the production of tragedy is that everything be in right measure and proportion.

Something quite else comes into consideration for comedy. (Our modern plays stand rather between the two; so that for their production one can learn from both.) When we come to comedy, it is character that begins to take the prominent place. Such a piece as I described just now can be very helpful to you, if you want to learn how to set about producing a comedy; for plays of this kind, abounding in the simple, primitive humour of the people, can always be begun in the way I will now describe.

The first thing is to see that your actor, who will reveal his character in his speaking, expresses himself with an instinctive enjoyment of his part, so that the audience feel at once: Yes, there he is—the Pantalone. today, of course, we put individual men and women on the stage, not types; nevertheless, we can set to work on the artistic shaping of our comedy on the same lines—that is, begin by letting the characters display themselves in their speech and gesture, and in no uncertain terms. We need not go so far as some miserable producers who, for example, if they put a barber on the stage, think it necessary he should be ostentatiously scraping the lather off a customer's chin. No occasion for grotesque demonstrations of that sort. But we should take pains in this first part of the play to let the several characters stand out in strong relief. As you see, we are here not concerned, as in tragedy, with the measure or tempo of the acting, but rather with its content.

As we go on towards the middle of the play, the interest will centre on the various conflicting factors that emerge and that leave us in some doubt as to how it is all going to end. And here it would actually be a little risky to continue entering with intensity into the individual characters; rather must the emphasis be laid on the plot. The whole character of the speaking must centre the hearer's attention on the plot. At this point the earlier comedies favoured the inventive actor. For the book of words left him extraordinarily free; he could extemporise here and there, expressing his astonishment, for instance, when something happens that gives the whole plot an unexpected turn—and so forth. Actors were in this way able on their own initiative to emphasise certain incidents or features in the plot.

And then, at the end of a comedy, particular emphasis should be laid on destiny. This is important. The acting must show how destiny breaks in upon the course of events and brings it all to a happy conclusion.

Comedy

(I) The emphasis is on the Characters.
(II) The emphasis is on the Plot.
(III) The emphasis is on Destiny.

If one is to produce a comedy successfully, with emphasis first on the characters, then on the plot, and finally on the working of destiny, one must of course do one's best to acquire a lively and sympathetic understanding of what destiny and character and plot are in their essential nature.

There is something more that the actor can do. Latent within him are deep feelings and perceptions, and these he should now evoke. What I am going to recommend may seem to you, my dear friends, to be rather external, but you should not on that account belittle it. If you will receive it and follow it out earnestly and with understanding, it will have a wonderful effect. It will awaken in your heart and soul a fine perception for how you are to set about acting—first tragedy, and then comedy. And as you continue to live with it, to live with it in meditation, you will also be helped to carry into real meditative experience the exercises of a more general nature in connection with your calling, that I have already given for your meditation and concentration. Take, for example, what I showed you the other day when we drew the circle of the vowels and found, on one side of the circle the development of tragedy, and on the other side the development of comedy Imitate in your soul the path followed by a drama of tragedy, and your soul will be so attuned that it will develop the skill required for the speaking and producing of your tragedy.

Where a meditation is intended to prepare us for a right treatment of tragedy, very much will depend on how far we are able, during the meditation, to attain inwardly what I described yesterday as liberation from our spoken part. This, my dear friends, must first be attained. We have to carry our preparation of the part up to the point where we have such command of it that we could go through it in our sleep. And then we must be able also to look at it, as it were, from without, taking an active and sympathetic interest in it and in the whole speaking of it (that speaking which we ourselves have created and formed), entering into it with heart and feeling, and also with will and with thought.

The actors of an older time were given meditations to prepare them for their task; and I would like now to give you a brief formula on the same lines. Approaching the words in the mood that belongs to tragedy, try to concentrate your soul with all inner warmth into just that mood that you need for the understanding of tragedy—for that kind of understanding which has actual formative power. And you will see, as you meditate the words you will attain this understanding. But you will need to repeat the meditative preparation over and over again. Go through it now and

then, when you have a few moments' leisure—you might be taking a walk one day, and come upon a secluded spot where you can sit and think quietly for a little. Here then are the words: Ach ( this is merely a preparatory interjection)—

Ach, Fatum,
Du hast
stark mich<
umfasst,
nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.²

I use the Latin word Fatum because, to begin with, the soul must be held steadily in the a and u that evoke the tragic mood: u giving the suggestion of fear, and a bespeaking awed amazement. Then, when we come to stark mich, note that i enters in, to take its part in the tragedy. Note too that farther on the vowels follow one another exactly as they do on the circle:

nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.

If you will meditate these words, letting speak in them, above all, the feeling that is called up within you by that inner perception of sound which you have acquired in your training, then the words can become for you a kind of foundation upon which you can build the production of your drama of tragedy.

Ach, Fatum,
Du hast
stark mich
umfasst,
nimm weg
den Fall
in den Abgrund.

These words give the mood for tragedy. If for a long time you have repeatedly held before you such a meditation, then you will assuredly find the right inner mood for tragedy when you need it.

For comedy, on the other hand, we have to go back to exercises of a more whimsical and subtle kind, that were not practised with the deep fervour that belongs to exercises for tragedy. (Tragedy, you must remember, is a child of the Mysteries.) None the less, even these exercises for humorous plays had a powerful esoteric influence. They were able actually to beget humour in the actor, and then they did not as it were take it back again but let it pour full stream into the speaking

For if you are going to produce comedy (and please when I use the word ‘produce’, do not take it in a merely external sense), you must be able to laugh in the words. I do not mean you should be perpetually tittering. There are persons who like to draw attention to their remarks by constantly tittering and laughing a little as they speak, a habit that is apt to leave one with the impression that there is not much point or meaning in what is being said. For the actor to bring laughter into his feeling for sound is quite a different matter. It works as true art—in spite of its popularity! There were always in an older time comedians who did this, just as surely as in the early Middle Ages you find priests taking part in the solemn and sublime dramas that were directly connected with the Church. And these early comedians, from among whom in course of time the first professional actors were recruited, laboured always to attain to a deep inner understanding of their work on the stage.

Here then I will again put before you a brief formula from olden times. It was not given merely to make tongue and palate elastic and plastic,—a result that we saw could be attained by cultivating sound-perception; these words, as one meditates them, turn into laughter. They must of course be meditated aloud. And then you will find you have to laugh.

Try practising aloud, as often as you can, this little string of words that I will now write on the blackboard. And, as you say them, enter into the speaking of them with your whole heart and feeling.

Izt'—this is really the word jetzt (now), but it has to be spoken here as izt—

Izt' fühl ich
wie in mir
linklock-hü
und lockläck-hi
völlig mir
witzig
bläst³

your soul; you will laugh inwardly, in your soul. Naturally, you cannot expect to attain that by deepening your feelings as for tragedy! And this has now to be your ideal—to carry into your speaking a laughing soul. Then will your work as producer be full of humour, the humour that has power of itself to produce and form a comedy.

And try to practise it, making with linklock-hü this movement (see first Drawing) and with lockläck-hi this movement (see second Drawing), so that you repeat the whole formula thus:

Izt' fiihl ich
wie in mir
linklock-hü
und lockläck-hi
völlig mir
witzig
bläst.

Try to live your way into this little formula, giving it its full development and speaking it always three times in succession—with the linklock-hü, pulling the upper lip upwards and the lower downwards, so that the lips are puckered; and with lockläck-hi flattening the creases out again.

As you continue repeating it, it will make you laugh in your soul; you will laugh inwardly, in your soul. Naturally, you cannot expect to attain that by deepening your feelings as for tragedy! And this has now to be your ideal—to carry into your speaking a laughing soul. Then will your work As producer be full of humour, the humour that has power of itself to produce and form a comedy.

• 1. The Age of the Spiritual (or Consciousness) Soul is the epoch of man's development in which we are now living and which began in the fifteenth century.
• 1. Pronounced very like our word’ five’. The sounds do not make a word at all in German.
• 2. fate,
  Thou hast laid
  firm hand
  upon me;
  suffer me not
  to fall
  into the abyss!
• 3. Inside me I feel
  how linklock-hä
  and lockläck-hi
  go wittily
  whispering
  on!

Dr. Steiner:

My dear friends!

We are in the middle of the reports by the General Secretaries and the representatives of the groups working in all kinds of places outside Dornach. In a moment we shall continue with these reports. But first I would like to speak a few words in the midst of these reports, words to which I am moved by what has been said in such a satisfactory way by these speakers. From what we have been told we may gather how very devoted is the work being carried on out there. We may add what we were told yesterday to the names I allowed myself to mention the day before. There, too, despite the ruins on which we stand, we may see what can encourage us during this Conference not to be pessimistic in any way but rather to strive actively for a genuine optimism.

During this Conference we must everywhere, in every realm, consider the activity of building-up rather than the activity of dismantling. So today, early on in the Conference, I want to suggest that we give it a certain definite direction. During the meetings of members over the next few days there will of course be opportunities for discussing various matters. But today, early on, I want to say the following: As we saw in the necessary content of the Statutes, we have to connect total openness with the Anthroposophical Society. Anything less, dear friends, is not permitted by the signs of the times. The present age can no longer tolerate any tendency towards secrecy. This presents us with a fundamental problem which we shall have to solve.

By this I do not mean that we shall have to discuss it a great deal during the Conference, for it is in our hearts that this fundamental problem will have to be solved. We must be absolutely clear about the fact that our Society, before all others, will be given the task of combining the greatest conceivable openness with true and genuine esotericism.

At first under the obstacles and hindrances of those terrible years of the war, but then also through all kinds of inner difficulties, we have indeed experienced the establishment of this problem in every direction. Indeed lately no meeting within the Anthroposophical Society has taken place which lacked, as it were, the backdrop—though unnoticed by many—of this problem: How can we combine full openness with the profoundest, most serious and inward esotericism? To achieve this it will be necessary to banish from our gatherings in the future anything which smacks in any way of the atmosphere of a clique. Anthroposophy does not need the atmosphere of a clique. When hearts truly understand Anthroposophy they will beat in unison without the need for heads to knock together. If we solve this purely human problem of letting our hearts sound in harmony with one another without the need for our heads to knock together, then from the human side we shall have done everything necessary, also in the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, to prepare for the achievement of the things that have been depicted.

We must achieve these things; we must reach the point at which we can feel in all our deeds that we are connected with the spiritual world. This is the very aspect which must be different in the Anthroposophical Society from any other possible association in the present time. The difference must be that out of the strength of Anthroposophy itself it is possible to combine the greatest conceivable openness with the most genuine and inward esotericism. And in future this esotericism must not be lacking even in the most external of our deeds. There is in this field still a lot to learn from the past ten years.

What I am saying is also related to our responsibilities. Consider the following, my dear friends: We stand in the world as a small Society, and this Society has a peculiar destiny at present. Even if it wanted to, it could not reject this characteristic of openness which I have been emphasizing so strongly. It would be unable to reject it. For if out of some leaning of sympathy we were to decide today to work only inwardly with our groups, which would of course be very nice, if we were not to concern ourselves with the public at large, we would discover that there would soon be an increasingly inimical concern for us on the part of the public. The more we fail to concern ourselves with the signs of the times, the more will be the inimical concern for us on the part of everything that can possibly be against us. Only if we find the path, only if with courage we find the straight path to what we should do shall we succeed in navigating the ship of the Anthroposophical Society through the exceedingly stormy waves which surge and break around it. What we should do is the following: As a small Society we face the world, a world—you know the one I mean—which actually does not love us. It does not love us. This is a fact we cannot alter. But on the other hand there is no need to do anything on purpose to make ourselves unpopular. I do not mean this in a superficial sense but in a deeper sense of which I speak from the foundations of occult life. If we ask ourselves over and over again what we must do to make ourselves better liked by this circle or by that circle in the world, by any circle which does not like us today; if we keep asking ourselves how we should behave in this field or in that field so as to be taken seriously here or there; if we do this, we shall most certainly not be taken seriously. We shall only be taken seriously if at every moment in whatever we do we feel responsible towards the spiritual world. We must know that the spiritual world wants to achieve a certain thing with mankind at this particular moment in historical evolution; it wants to achieve this in the most varied realms of life, and it is up to us clearly and truly to follow the impulses that come from the spiritual world. Though this might give offence initially, in the long run it is the only beneficial way. Therefore we shall also only come to terms among ourselves if at every opportunity we steep ourselves in whatever impulses can come out of the spiritual world.

So now, having given these indications, which I shall bring to completion over the next few days, I once more want to repeat before you at least a part of those words which were spoken to you yesterday in accordance with the will of the spiritual world. May they stand as an introduction in our souls again today as we enter into our discussions.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling in depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.
Soul of Man!

Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

We can work rightly with words such as these, which are heard coming from the Cosmic Word, if we arrange them in our own soul in such a way that they cannot depart from us again. And it will be possible for them to be so arranged if, amongst all that has resounded, you first highlight that part which can give you the rhythm. Dear friends, let me write down here first of all the part that can indicate the rhythm:

In the first verse: Spirit-recalling,
in the second verse: Spirit-awareness,
in the third verse: Spirit-beholding.

Contemplate this in its rhythmical connection with what is brought about in the human soul which is called upon, the human soul which is called upon by itself, through the words:

Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I—,

consider the rhythm linked with ‘spirit-awareness’ when you hear:

Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I—,

and the rhythm linked with ‘spirit-beholding’ when you hear:

On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing—.

Take in this way each phrase so that it can only stand as I have written it here. Take what comes rhythmically out of the Cosmic Rhythm: ‘own I within God's I’, ‘own I in the World-I’, ‘own I in free willing’. And take what rises up from ‘comes to being’ to ‘unite’ to ‘bestow’, where there is the transition to moral feeling. Feel the connection with ‘spirit-recalling’, ‘spirit-awareness’ and ‘spirit-beholding’. Then you will have in the inner rhythm what it is during these few days that the spiritual world is bringing to us to raise our hearts, to illumine our thinking, to give wings and enthusiasm to our willing.

I now have a telegram to read to you: ‘Christmas greetings, best wishes, Ethel Morgenstierne.’ And now may I ask the representative of Honolulu, Madame Ferreri, to speak.

Madame Ferreri reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of Italy, Baroness de Renzis, to speak.

Baroness de Renzis reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I perhaps suggest that certain questions raised here, such as that of accepting applications for membership on the basis of correspondence only, and similar matters, shall be discussed later when we consider the Statutes.

Dr. Steiner: The Duke of Cesaro will also give a report concerning Italy on behalf of the Novalis Group in Rome.

The Duke of Cesaro reports.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask Fräulein Schwarz to speak on behalf of the other Italian group.

Fräulein Schwarz reports on behalf of the group in Milan.

Dr. Steiner: Now would the representative of the work in Yugoslavia, Herr Hahl, please speak.

Herr Hahl reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I ask the representative of the Norwegian Society, Herr Ingerö, to speak.

Herr Ingerö speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask the representative of the Council of the Austrian Society, Count Polzer, to speak.

Count Polzer speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Now may I ask the representative of the group in Porto Alegre in Brazil, Dr Unger, to speak.

Dr. Unger: Allow me in a few words to carry out a commission which I was most delighted to accept. For quite some time we have been corresponding with friends over there, mostly from Germany, who had emigrated and had begun to work there anthroposophically. Herr Brandtner in particular has been writing lately. He has made great efforts to get something going in Porto Alegre. And connected with this, work is also going on in other South American towns which will gradually be co-ordinated so that independent centres from which to work may be set up there too. For this purpose Herr Mayen from Breslau was asked by the friends over there to go out, first of all to Rio. He will gradually take on work in a number of towns. I have been particularly asked to give voice to the sympathetic interest of the friends over there. Everything that comes to us from over there expresses the most intimate interest in all that has to do with Dornach and whatever continues to come from Dornach. As often as possible someone comes to Europe and we hope most fervently that anthroposophical life may soon start to blossom there in the most intensive way. Just as I bring greetings from our friends over there, so I hope that when I report back to Porto Alegre I may also be permitted to send them from here our good wishes for the prospering of the work in Porto Alegre.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Swedish Anthroposophical Society, Fräulein Henström, to speak.

Fräulein Henström reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society, Herr Aeppli, to speak.

Herr Aeppli reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the representative of the Council in Czechoslovakia, Dr Krkavec, to speak.

Dr. Krkavec reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I now ask the other representative of the Council in Czechoslovakia, Dr Eiselt, to speak.

Dr Eiselt reports.

Dr. Steiner: This brings the reports to a close. I believe I may be allowed to say that you are all, with me, exceedingly grateful to those who have given them. For they enable us to see that we have a foundation on which to base our new work, since now we know how much truly great, devoted and varied work is being done and has already been done in the Anthroposophical Society.

Now I should like to move on to the third point on our agenda, consideration of the Statutes. First the Statutes must be read out. Though you all have a copy, I would nevertheless like to ask that they be read out once more, so that we can then commence the discussion of each point. Would Dr Wachsmuth now please read the Statutes in accordance with point three of our agenda.

Dr. Wachsmuth reads out the Statutes of the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: As you will have gathered from various remarks I have made, it would be really good if on the one hand our meeting could be allowed to run as freely as possible amongst its individual members. However, on the other hand, if a proper discussion is to take place, it is necessary for us to be quite strict in conducting the debate. So please take this not as pedantry but as a necessity applicable to any gathering. Today we have run out of time, so I would ask you that we continue this meeting tomorrow after Dr Wachsmuth's lecture. Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock Dr Wachsmuth will give his lecture. Then we shall break for a quarter of an hour before continuing the meeting. At this meeting I should like to conduct the proceedings as follows. Not in order to be pedantic but so that we can be as efficient as possible there will first be a kind of general debate on the Statutes, a debate in which first of all the whole attitude, meaning and spirit of the Statutes in general is discussed.

Then I shall ask you to agree to the Statutes in general, after which we shall open a detailed debate in which we take one Paragraph at a time, when contributors will be asked to speak only to the Paragraph under consideration. There will then be a concluding debate leading to the final adoption of the Statutes. This is how I would ask you to proceed tomorrow when we discuss the Statutes.

Now I have to announce that our Conference continues this afternoon with a eurythmy performance at 4.30 and my lecture at 8 o'clock this evening. Tomorrow at 10 o'clock we shall hear Dr Guenther Wachsmuth's lecture in the field of natural science about the face of the earth and the destiny of man. Then after a quarter of an hour's break we shall continue with this meeting.

I also have several more announcements to make. As I had to stress earlier, before we began our meeting, it is quite difficult, because there are so many of us—and it is of course wonderful that there are so many dear friends here—to hold this gathering together. You cannot tell, just by coming to the meetings, how difficult it is. Of course we are deeply sorry that the primitive quarters here are causing such discomfort and so many problems for our dear friends. Nevertheless, I have to ask that in future not more than three seats are held by any one person. I have to say this because it has happened that whole rows of seats have been held by a single person, and this has led to innumerable discussions with those who have come in later.

Then I should like to remind you of the wish we expressed earlier that the two front rows be reserved for those dear friends who are either disabled or deaf or need special consideration for any other reason. If there are any seats left in these two rows, which is sure to be the case, then please leave them free for the General Secretaries of the different countries and for the secretaries who might be accompanying them. It will become necessary in the next few days to have the General Secretaries together here where they can be seen rather than scattered all over the hall.

Thirdly I would perhaps like once more to ask our Dornach friends—truly I have nothing personal against them—to take their seats next door in the ‘summer villa’.⁴⁴ I know it is most inhospitable in this rainy and snowy weather, but all we can do is ask our Dornach friends to put up with the rain so that the friends from further afield can sit here in the hall away from the rain.

Also I would like to mention that from today the upper canteen will be open in the evening for those friends who are quartered in the dormitories or other inhospitable places, so that they may have somewhere to go that is heated. Food and drink will not be served then, but I hope that the conversations that can take place there will be all the more stimulating and encouraging. So although it will not be possible to quench hunger and thirst, it will be possible to keep as warm as may be in the evenings after my lecture until 11 o'clock at night.

Furthermore I want to draw your attention to the following: Mr Pyle in the most admirable way has modelled a very fine money-box⁴⁵ which he has had produced. You will find these money-boxes outside the doors. If you look at them carefully you will find that the beautiful forms tempt you to want to own such a money-box yourselves. They are for sale, so you can buy one and take it home and put something in it every day. When it is full you can use what you have collected to put towards the re-building of the Goetheanum, or for any other purposes related to the Goetheanum. Let me point out that even if you only put in 10 Rappen every day—think what you might spend this on each day—by the end of the year you will have saved quite a tidy sum. I can see my respected friends here are already working out how much! You will find that it will be a worthwhile amount. But I don't want to encourage you to put in only 10 Rappen. I would rather you put in whatever amount you consider proper, or whatever you feel obliged to put in even if you don't think it proper.

Those who find it difficult for one reason or another to take a money-box home with them will see that similar money-boxes have been set out here into which they may put something. Naturally if you do not have your own money-box to take home, it would be a good thing if you could delve deeply into your purse while you are here, so that these money-boxes may be filled. We shall have no trouble in seeing to it that they are rapidly emptied.

Finally I would please ask that spectators at the Christmas Plays refrain from booking their seats for the evening lectures.

You see, without all these many wishes—let us not call them prohibitions—we shall be unable to keep the Conference going in an orderly manner.

Now, my dear friends, I adjourn this meeting until the appointed hour tomorrow.

• 44. This designation for the extension built on to the carpentry workshop for the occasion of the Christmas Conference referred to ‘the chilly draught which blew there permanently’ (Ernst Lehrs Gelebte Erwartung, Stuttgart, 1979).
• 45. On the basis of a pencil drawing by Rudolf Steiner.